The Internet Named a Weird Deep-Sea Creature, and 11 People Had the Exact Same Idea

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...