World's Smallest Bumblebee Goby Named After Blackpink's Jennie

A new bumblebee goby species, Brachygobius jennie, was described June 17 in Zoosystematics and Evolution. It is the first bumblebee goby ever recorded in China.

The fish maxes out at under 9 mm. That makes it the smallest known member of its genus, possibly the smallest fish in China, and among the tiniest vertebrates on the planet, the authors wrote.

News of the discovery spread fast through both biology circles and K-pop fan communities, the South China Morning Post reported.

Jiangyan Tian, a postgraduate student at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and the study's first author, found the fish in April 2025 during fieldwork in mangrove wetlands on Hengqin Island, at the mouth of the Pearl River near Macau. The fish hugged the bottom in shallow water. She first assumed they were juveniles of a known species, until the markings matched nothing on record for the area, she recalled in an announcement from the journal's publisher, Pensoft.

The find surprised the team. The fish fauna of the Pearl River estuary is generally considered well documented.

Back in the lab, Tian ran an integrated genetic and morphological analysis with colleagues at Sun Yat-sen University and confirmed the fish was new to science, according to the Pensoft announcement.

The team brought in Sébastien Lavoué of Universiti Sains Malaysia, where several bumblebee goby species occur. He said he had never encountered one so small and distinctive. In total, the researchers described 31 specimens.

Brachygobius jennie can be distinguished from related gobies by four narrow dark bars behind the head, including a chevron-shaped second bar, phys.org reported from the study. Genetic data confirmed it as a separate species.

Its size is what makes it scientifically useful. Squeezing a functioning vertebrate body into less than a centimeter forces deep trade-offs in anatomy and physiology. The authors wrote that the fish offers a rare model for studying the developmental constraints and evolutionary mechanisms behind extreme miniaturization.

They added that estuarine fishes across Asia remain poorly cataloged and face mounting environmental pressure.

The name was Tian's tribute. Listening to Jennie's songs was "a constant source of inspiration" during her studies, she told the journal. Naming the species after the singer was her way of acknowledging that influence.

Naming species after admired public figures is a long tradition. Jennie is not even the first member of her group to be honored. In 2023, researchers at Chiang Mai University in Thailand named a critically endangered flowering plant, Friesodielsia lalisae, after her Thai-born bandmate Lisa, Thailand's The Nation reported at the time.

In April 2026, German scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich named a 100-million-year-old insect preserved in Myanmar amber after the boy band Stray Kids. The clawlike forelegs on the fossil resembled one of the group's signature poses. That study appeared in the journal Insects and was reported by phys.org.