Areopaguristes tudgei. That's the name of a new species of
hermit crab recently discovered on the barrier reef off the
coast of Belize by Christopher Tudge, a biology professor at
American University in Washington, D.C. Tudge has been
interested in biology his whole life, from boyhood trips to the
beach collecting crustaceans in his native Australia, to his
undergraduate and PhD work in zoology and biology at the
University of Queensland. He has collected specimens all over
the world, from Australia to Europe to North and South America.
Until now, he has never had a species named after him. He only
found out about his namesake after reading an article about it
in the journal Zootaxa. Apparently, finding out after-the-fact
is standard practice in the highly formalized ritual of naming a
new species. The two crustacean taxonomists and authors of the
paper who named the new crab after Tudge, Rafael Lemaitre of the
Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian
Institution's National Museum of Natural Hist