Up for auction are four frogs of varying shades, four species of orchid and a reddish ant with a trap-jaw. There’s also a gray forest mouse with impressively long whiskers, a wormlike amphibian and a burnt-orange salamander with tiny legs.

Paul Salaman, the chief executive of Rainforest Trust, is familiar with the objections to species-naming auctions. In the early 1990s, these auctions were a new concept when Dr. Salaman, a field biologist, sold the rights to name a species of songbird he discovered in Colombia. There were some conservationists who were outraged at the idea of giving companies the chance to impose their brand on the natural world, he said.

Dr. Salaman’s counterargument is that the threats to these species posed by climate change and industrial blights, like logging, are far more pressing than the threat of artificial names.

“The name itself doesn’t really matter,” Dr. Salaman said. “The key is the funding to save the species.”

The practice of playfully naming new species after celebrities, friends and enemies is as old as the practice of binomial nomenclature, the scientific naming of organisms.



Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish botanist and the first scientist to consistently apply binomial nomenclature, used species naming to both honor and mock his contemporaries. According to the book “Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist,” Linnaeus named a yellow coneflower after his mentor. He also named an unpleasant-smelling weed after Johann Siegesbeck, a German botanist and one of Linnaeus’s enemies.

Image This Ecuadorean ant species, whose name is up for auction, was discovered by a researcher after one flew into his bedroom. Credit... Rainforest Trust

These scientific names are meant to last forever. In an extreme example, a Croatian entomologist named a Slovene beetle after Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, when he was chancellor of Germany. Because convention does not allow for name changes, Anophthalmus hitleri has endured.