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A newly designated butterfly species, Euptychia andrewberryi, has been named in honor of Harvard lecturer Andrew J. Berry by postdoctoral fellow Shinichi Nakahara, who identified the species.
Nakahara, a postdoc in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, named the species after Berry because the butterfly was first found in a 19th century collection of biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who Berry has dedicated much of his scholarship to studying. The decision, which was made in 2022, was announced in August.
“He was obsessed with Alfred Russel Wallace, so I thought this would be a perfect species that can be named after him,” Nakahara said.
The Euptychia andrewberryi is a butterfly found in the Amazon rainforest. Nakahara studies male tropical butterfly classifications in Central and South America because the region is especially biodiverse. He found the Euptychia andrewberryi in Wallace’s butterfly collection at the Natural History Museum in London.
Though Nakahara submitted his thesis in 2015, the research required extensive travel to museums across the world and DNA sequencing, resulting in a decade-long project that was only published on Aug. 8.
Nakahara first met Berry in 2022 when visiting Cambridge to work under Naomi E. Pierce, a Harvard biology professor and Nakahara’s principal investigator, as well as Berry’s wife.
“We were eating a burrito from Trader Joe’s. He said he was jealous because Naomi had at least a couple of new species named after her, whereas he didn’t have any,” Nakahara said. “So, he asked me if I can name one after him.”
Berry said he was “over the moon” to have the species named after him.
“The thing about a species name – it’s forever,” he said. “That's the closest I’ll ever get to immortality.”
For Berry, the honor was particularly meaningful because of his “fixation” with the biologist who found the butterfly in the 19th century. Wallace, who co-discovered evolution with Charles Darwin, never received a formal education before becoming an explorer and biologist. Berry said he has been fascinated with Wallace since he was asked to write about his life for the London Review of Books in 2000.
“The more you learn about his life story, and the more you read of his writing, the more in love with Wallace you fall,” he said.
Nakahara’s published derivation of the species name also humorously includes that it was “coined in appreciation” of Berry’s introduction of British cereal “Weetabix” to him.
“It's not very tasty. Put sugar on it to make it palatable, and you just pour milk, but that's what he was eating every day,” Nakahara said.
But both Nakahara and Berry said the research into organism classifications was more important than the naming honor or the new species designation.
“Eighty percent to 90 percent of Earth’s organisms probably don’t have a name,” Nakahara said. “But I think the goal of taxonomy is not really to discover new species, it’s to revise a species level of taxonomy, and as a consequence, we find organisms that don’t have names.”
Berry said the work Nakahara and other evolutionary biologists do to distinguish species from each other is central to protecting biodiversity.
“It might seem slightly pedantic, nitpicky kind of work, right? Distinguishing this butterfly from that butterfly species and so on, but basically, it’s critical,” Berry said.
“It’s absolutely mission critical to our understanding of the biological world, and therefore,” he added, “it’s mission critical to our custodianship of the biodiversity on planet Earth.”
