Scientists want to name a blind sea creature after Donald Trump

Donald Trump has worked hard during his time in the White House to ignore the clean, dry facts of science. 

But science now has a small amount of revenge in the form of an underwater creature named for Trump and his pattern of climate change denial. 

The creature, a four-to-five-inch-long caecilian discovered in Panama, is described as a blind, worm-like amphibian that buries its head in the sand.

The little worm species is now named Dermophis donaldtrumpi because, well, that behavior so closely echoes Trump’s actions on climate change.

The new Trump-named creature. Cabinet appointment pending.

This genius move was made by Aidan Bell, co-founder of the U.K. sustainable building materials company EnviroBuild. 

In an email, Bell said the choice to name came out of the recent COP24 talks in Poland.

“The failure of global legislators to find solutions to climate change should be a problem for everyone not a political football,” Bell said.

Bell also doesn’t shy away from some science burns in this blog post about the creature:

Caecilians is taken from the Latin Caecus meaning “blind”, and have rudimentary eyes which can only detect light or dark. Capable of seeing the world only in black and white, Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese.

The dermophis genus grows an extra layer of skin which their young use their teeth to peel off and eat, a behaviour known as dermatrophy.  As a method of ensuring their children survive in life Donald Trump prefers granting them high roles in the Oval Office.

Bell won the rights to the naming in a charity auction supporting the Rainforest Trust and says he expects biologists to indeed bestow this name upon the creature following a peer review of research on the species.

Not everyone is thrilled with the name, seeing it as something that overshadows the discovery itself.  

That said, in his blog, Bell acknowledges the silliness of the name but stresses the very real, very serious message underlying the decision:

While the story itself is lighthearted, EnviroBuild are really aiming to push forward an important message; with climate change only accelerating, legislation still isn’t doing enough to apply the brakes. This means the only option is to create new avenues ourselves in which we change the way we buy, build and live our lives.

In 2017, Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement and the U.S. now stands as the lone country opposed to the agreement. 

But that’s hardly the only damage Trump has wrought on climate change policy since he took office. 

He’s built an anti-climate change EPA, has gone all in on coal, and is trying to greatly widen drilling which would put an extraordinary amount of wildlife at risk. And that’s just off the top of my head. 

Perhaps more to the point, with regards to his new underwater namesake, Trump continues to have a hard time telling the difference between weather and climate and has directly refuted an alarming climate change report from his own administration.