Ophelina meyerae

"Oh, I'll just check my messages quick," I thought, chewing the last of my breakfast as I prepared to step out the door. I scrolled through the bolded subject lines of my unread e-mails, some important, some not, until one of them caught my eye:

You are about to have a polychaete named after you!

I stopped short. Could this be real? The sender was Dr. Adrian Glover, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. I know Adrian; we had been on a research expedition together in 2015, and he's also the president of the Deep-Sea Biology Society. My curiosity was piqued. 

I opened the message, and sure enough, it was real. Here's how it happened:

When the Abyssline project started, Adrian's team knew they would have a lot of new species in their samples from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (after all, it is a severely understudied area of the deep sea). When you describe a new species, you have to name it. So Adrian and his collaborators came up with a unique way of naming all those new species: they made a list of all scientists and crew members that participated in the Abyssline cruises (AB01 in 2013 and AB02 in 2015, the cruise I was on), randomized the order, and named each new species after the next person in the list. My name apparently fell towards the top of the list, so ladies and gentlemen (drumroll please), allow me to introduce you to...

Ophelina meyerae! This small, segemented worm lives in the mud between manganese nodules at 4300 m in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It is pale yellow in life and has short bristles down its body. In my mind, it is beautiful. 

Having a species named after you is considered a high honor, so I'm grateful to Adrian and his team for such a wonderful surprise. You can read about Ophelina meyerae and the 11 other new species named after Abyssline participants in the journal ZooKeys: https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/36193/