One of world's smallest fish named after Blackpink's Jennie

Researchers in southern China have named a newly discovered fish after Blackpink's Jennie, crediting the K-pop star's music with carrying the lead scientist through years of study.

The species, Brachygobius jennie, was described June 17 in the peer-reviewed journal Zoosystematics and Evolution. It is the first bumblebee goby ever recorded in China.

At a maximum length of under 9 mm, it is the smallest known member of its genus, possibly the smallest fish in China, and among the smallest fish anywhere in the world, the authors wrote.

The discovery drew quick interest from biologists and K-pop fans alike, the South China Morning Post reported.

Bumblebee gobies take their name from the bold black-and-yellow banding that makes them look like tiny bees, and the freshwater and brackish-water species are popular in home aquariums.

Jiangyan Tian, a postgraduate student at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and the study's first author, came across this one during fieldwork in the mangrove wetlands of Hengqin Island, at the mouth of the Pearl River next to Macau, in April 2025.

The fish were hugging the bottom in shallow water. She first assumed they were juveniles of a familiar species, until their markings matched nothing on record for the area, she recalled in an announcement from the journal's publisher, Pensoft.

The find was a surprise, since 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 also brought in Sébastien Lavoué of Universiti Sains Malaysia, where several bumblebee goby species occur, who said he had never encountered one so small and distinctive. In all, the researchers described 31 specimens.

Brachygobius jennie can be told apart 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 valuable.

Squeezing a functioning vertebrate body into less than a centimeter forces profound trade-offs in anatomy and physiology, and 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, and naming the species after the singer was her way of acknowledging that influence.

Jennie, member of the K-pop group Blackpink. Photo from Jennie's Instagram

Naming species after admired public figures is a long-running scientific tradition, and Jennie is not even the first member of her own group to be honored this way.

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, after deciding 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.