By Mindy
Weisberger, Senior Writer | November 29, 2017 11:07am ET
The
cascading 1970s-era locks of musicians in the progressive-rock group Rush
recently inspired a team of researchers to lend the rockers' names to a trio of
microbes with flowing flagella that resemble the band members' hair.
Unlike the
Canadian band, the microbes are found in the guts of termites, where they help
the insects digest compounds found in woody plants. They belong to the
genus Pseudotrichonympha, which was first identified in 1910 and includes
single-celled microbes, called protists, with a
single nucleus and copious "hair" in rows over most of the cell body.
The three
new microbe species — named for Rush singer and bassist Geddy Lee, guitarist
Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart — are Pseudotrichonympha leei, P. lifesoni and P.
pearti, and were found in two species of termites from North America
and Australia, according to a new study.
Patrick Keeling, the study's lead author and
a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia — and a Canadian — had
recommended that one of his co-authors listen to Rush as an example of
"good Canadian music," Keeling said in a statement. When the team
described the microbes, which were covered with long flagella, there were
inevitable comparisons to photos of the long-haired Rush members on the cover
of their album "2112," released in 1976.
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