In the HBO hit "Game of Thrones" (GoT), the scene where the Night King leads the ghosts to attack the Great Wall of the North left a deep shock to the audience. But recently, Australian researchers have also paid tribute to the GoT villain, naming some new winter bee "Paramonovius Nightking". The bees are known to inhabit a smaller area of western Australia and are about a centimeter (less than half an inch) long.
(Credit: CSIRO, via Cnet)
Details of the study have been published in the recently published Austral Entomologyscience journal.
It was named "Paramonovius Nightking" because of its habit of winter activity in Australia and has a crown on its spine.
The Australian Federal Science and Technology (CSIRO) said it was one of 230 new species named by the research group in the past year.
Named after Paramonovius Nightking is Xuankun Li, a PhD student at the Australian National Entomological Museum in Canberra, who is also a big fan of Game of Thrones.
Bryan Lessard, an entomologist at CSIRO's National Research Centre for Australia, said in a statement: "Although naming a new species is a serious matter, taxonomists can still give it an interesting name.".
Some of the other new species mentioned by CSIRO include a cusk eel called Barathronus ALGrahami, a soldier fly called Prosopochrysa lemannae, and a fly called Scutellumina Parvatra.
Lessard adds: "Scientists can discover around 1,000 new species across the country each year, and at the current rate, it will take 350 years to know the remaining species."