Creature Names

While browsing through some of my favorite sites, I stumbled upon Parasite of the day, and the selection of that day was Trypanosoma irwini. It was discovered in Australia, and named in honor of Steve Irwin "The Crocodile Hunter".
I always liked the rule that the discoverer gets to give it a name. Sometimes it's just the boring color (alba, rubrum), or location (pennsylvanicum) But sometimes the names show a real sense of humor in the taxonomist. There is a genus of beetles Agra, some of whose species are Agra cadabra
and Agra vation. or a fly genus phthiria, called Phthiria relativitae. There is a whole website devoted to this. Quite often, species are named after people, sometimes the discoverer, or someone important to the discoverer, or, as in this case, an important local celebrity.
Once upon a time, in a previous life as an undergrad, I had a professor who was not so subtly trying to convince me to go for a graduate degree studying an organism called Euplotes. He, as a graduade student, had discovered a new species of Euplotes and had named it after his mentor, who before that had done likewise. I was sure that he was looking for someone to do the same for him. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to be me. One, I wasn't particularly crazy about the critter itself. and two, If I did discover something new, I'd more likely name it after some girl I was crazy about at the time. I joined the Peace Corps and went off to South America instead.