A newly-discovered blind amphibian from Panama will be named after Donald Trump in recognition of the US president’s stance on climate change, according to a media report.
EnviroBuild, a UK-based sustainable building materials company, announced on December 18 that it would be using Dermophis donaldtrumpi as the name for the amphibian with no legs and poor eyesight. The company says the name still will need to undergo peer review, but that other animals have been named after presidents in the past.
The name was chosen by Aidan Bell, the boss of the firm which paid thousands at an auction for the right, The Guardian reported.
The small creature is blind and has an ability to bury its head in the ground. These features Bell said match the US leader’s opinion on climate change. Trump in June last year withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement, which commits countries to keeping a limit on rising global temperatures.
Snakelike animals
The Panamanian underground amphibians are particularly vulnerable to global warming. Dermophis donaldtrumpi , 10 centimetres in length and belonging to group of snakelike animals called caecilians, was recently found in Panama by a group of scientists.
Its naming rights were auctioned off in a fundraiser for Rainforest Trust, a non-profit rainforest conservation organisation, the report said. The winning bid of USD 34,478 was made by Aidan Bell, the head of a UK-based sustainable building materials company called EnviroBuild.
“It is the perfect name,” Bell said. “Caecilian is taken from the Latin caecus, meaning ‘blind’, perfectly mirroring the strategic vision President Trump has consistently shown towards climate change.” Bell said Trump’s worldview resembled a caecilian’s, whose eyes can only detect light and dark. “Capable of seeing the world only in black and white. Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese,” he added.
Climate change debate
The world’s leading scientists agree that climate change is primarily human-induced. But Trump, whose administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, has accused those scientists of having a “political agenda” and cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the Earth’s rising temperatures.
“I don’t know that it’s man-made,” he said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes in October. “I’m not denying climate change but [temperatures] could very well go back,” he added, without offering evidence. He justified this decision by asserting that he had been elected to serve the citizens of Pittsburgh and not Paris and the deal disadvantaged US businesses and workers.
Caecilians lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago to better burrow in the earth, and live almost entirely underground.
“Burrowing its head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry,” Bell said.
