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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Shame the entomologist didn't offer to let the guy who actually discovered, photographed, and collected the bug name it. I was waiting for that to be the happy ending of the story, but surprisingly he just named it after his own daughter.

[(optional) insert lame joke about proper attribution]

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Yeah, this sentence: "The new species was dubbed Semachrysa jade — not after its pale green color, but after Winterton's daughter." just bothered me. A total dick move by Winterton.

It's pretty presumptuous to call someone a dick when you know none of the details of the situation. It's entirely possible that he asked the guy if he wanted to name it and he turned it down.

Only if anecdotal, I find people from English speaking nations outside of North America being incredibly opportunistic in these things.

This observation purely emerges from my experience.

isn't that a bit of a generalization

Some are in for the fame, others for the money.

I find North Americans incredibly opportunistic in registering patents. A friend that does network support outsourcing was complaining that their (American) boss was setting targets on number of patents registered by their support gig.

I am the photographer. Shaun asked if it's okay to name it after his daughter. At that time, I thought it can't be named after the person who discovered the new species so I agreed.

Anyway, that's in the past now. Click here to check out more images of this beautiful lacewing: http://orionmystery.blogspot.com/2012/08/semachrysa-jade-new...

Thank you for coming here and clarifying.

I hope this only encourages you to take more photographs, and one day soon you'll have a new species named after you!

Thank you! Oh I love nature photography, esp the smaller creatures! It will be cool to have a species named after me! :)

The photographer wasn't without recognition. He is now a published co-author in a scientific journal. That's something.

Not really. I am not getting much publicity out of this. No $$ for sure since the images were all under CC-BY creative common licensing. No much fame either due to the way the attribution was done. My real name was used rather than my more common nick: Kurt orionmystery.

Oh well.

That sucks... I hope you're not too bitter about it. Would you mind sharing your flickr page here?

A little, actually. But luckily I did get a bit of exposure from Yahoo News and Flickr Blog. They asked me nicely if they could use my images and how I would like to be attributed. I told them to use my nick instead of my real name, and also include link to my blog.

My blog entry on this new species is here: http://orionmystery.blogspot.com/2012/08/semachrysa-jade-new...

You can find my flickr page from there :)

Daily Mail UK is the worse. The moderator wouldn't even let me comment on its page!

Just to note.

> He also found a matching specimen that had been sitting in the museum's collection, unclassified, for decades.

Yeah, he should have at least put the photographer's name in there somewhere.

He did:

    Winterton SL, Guek HP, Brooks SJ

    A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered
    in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence
    of citizen scientist, online image database and
    cybertaxonomy

    ZooKeys 2012; 214: 1–11. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.214.3220

Charismatic? Seems a bit generous. Panda bears are charismatic.

Charismatic in this sense refers to the fact that it can act a "symbol or rallying point to stimulate conservation awareness and action"[1], which seems appropriate considering the poignancy of how this species was discovered.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagship_species

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