Here’s a sentence you probably didn’t expect to read today: Thousands of strangers on the internet just collectively named a deep-sea creature that lives on sunken wood at the bottom of the ocean, and the whole thing started because of a YouTube video.
The creature in question is a chiton — a type of marine mollusk — that scientists first discovered in 2024 in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench off the coast of Japan, at a depth of over 5,500 meters (3.4 miles). It belongs to a rare genus called Ferreiraella, and it now has an official scientific name: Ferreiraella populi. The species name, in Latin, means “of the people.”
And yeah, that name was crowd-sourced. From social media. By more than 8,000 people.
How Ze Frank Kicked Off a Global Naming Campaign
If you’re already a Ze Frank fan — and let’s be honest, if you’ve spent any meaningful time on YouTube, there’s a decent chance you are — you might already know how this went down.
The Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), working with scientific publisher Pensoft Publishers and popular science YouTuber Ze Frank, invited the public to help name the newly identified deep-sea chiton. Ze Frank featured the rare mollusk from the genus Ferreiraella in an episode of his beloved “True Facts” series, and from there, the internet did what the internet does best: it showed up in force.
Over 8,000 name ideas were submitted through social media. Eight. Thousand. That’s a staggering number of suggestions for a small, armored creature most people had never heard of before — and it speaks to the kind of engaged, enthusiastic community that creators like Ze Frank have built online.
The official scientific description of the species was published February 6 in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.
What’s the Name, Exactly?
After scientists reviewed the massive pool of submissions, they selected Ferreiraella populi as the winner. And the kicker? Eleven different participants independently suggested the exact same name during the online process, researchers say.
Let that sink in. Out of more than 8,000 submissions, 11 separate people — who presumably didn’t coordinate with each other — all landed on the same Latin phrase meaning “of the people.” It’s the kind of collective-intelligence moment that feels almost too perfect, like something an algorithm would generate to restore your faith in humanity. But it happened organically, across social media, driven by people who just wanted to be part of something cool.
So What Even Is This Creature?
Fair question. The deep-sea chiton is, to put it mildly, a strange little organism. It has eight armoured shell plates and an iron-clad radula — that’s essentially a tongue — and it belongs to a rare group known for living only on sunken wood in the deep sea. It was pulled from a trench more than three miles below the ocean surface off the coast of Japan.
And if you thought the creature itself couldn’t get weirder: it also hosts a small group of worms that feed on its excrement near its tail, according to details of the species revealed in the Biodiversity Data Journal. So, not exactly a cuddly mascot — but undeniably fascinating.
The Ghibli Name That Almost Was
For the pop-culture crowd, there was another name in the running that deserves a moment of appreciation. One of the options was Ferreiraella ohmu, a reference to a chiton-like creature from Studio Ghibli — providing a nod to Japan, where the species was found.
If you’ve seen “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” you already know why this feels so right. The Ohmu are massive, armored, insect-like creatures that are iconic within the Ghibli universe. A chiton named after them would have been a genuinely delightful crossover between deep-sea biology and anime fandom.
But ultimately, scientists went with the name that honored the broader community effort rather than a single cultural reference — and it’s hard to argue with the poetry of “of the people.”
Why This Matters Beyond the Memes
The naming campaign isn’t just a fun internet moment. It actually represents something unusual in how science typically works.
Scientific names are usually assigned by the authors who publish the first scientific description and must follow international rules such as the ICZN (zoology) or the ICN (botany). Epithets are often based on physical traits, locations, mythology, or people honored for their contributions. Public input is not the norm.
“We were overwhelmed by the response and the massive number of creative name suggestions!” said study author Julia Sigwart from the Natural History Museum Frankfurt, per The Independent.
And the timeline here is remarkable, too. The species was discovered in 2024 and now, just two years later, it has an official scientific description and name. That’s blazing fast by taxonomy standards.
“It can often take ten, if not twenty years, for a new species to be studied, scientifically described, named, and published,” Dr. Sigwart said. “Finding a name for the chiton together on social media is a wonderful opportunity to do just that! Ferreiraella populi has now been described and given a scientific name only two years after its discovery.”
