Meet the Mother Monster of the insect world.
Her name is Kaikaia gaga (named for Lady Gaga, natch) and she’s every bit as otherworldly as the pop diva. She wears a pair of devilish horns on her head, and she’s unlike any other species in the forest.
Kaikaia gaga is a newly identified species of treehopper, an ostentatious but little-known insect group that populates most forests on Earth. A paper detailing her discovery was recently published in the journal Zootaxa, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on animal taxonomy.
But treehoppers have never gotten their due, according to Brendan Morris, an entomology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studied and named the new insect.
