ZAP // Jiangyan Tian et al; Nolae
Examples of Brachygobius jennie collected by Jiangyan Tian; on the right, Jennie Ruby Jane, from the K-Pop band BLACKPINK
Tiny, rare and named after a K-pop star, the Brachygobius jennie is the first bee goby identified in China — and may help understand how far a vertebrate’s body can shrink.
A popular K-pop star has found an unlikely place in the scientific record after researchers in China gave her name to a newly discovered species of fish.
Jennie Ruby Janedas , was “a constant source of inspiration” for the master’s student who discovered the tiny black and yellow fish, shorter than an average human fingernail, near the Pearl River estuary in southern China.
The fish, baptized Brachygobius jennieis the first bee goby found in China and could serve as a model to study the biological limits of vertebrate miniaturization, according to an article published last week in the scientific journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.
Jiangyan Tianwho discovered the fish and led the study, said that listening to Jennie’s songs inspired her during her studies. Naming the species after the singer was his way of recognize Jennie’s “positive influence” on your work.
When Tian spotted the minnows during fieldwork in mangrove swamps near the Pearl River estuary in April 2025, he initially thought they were juveniles. “But the patterns that presented did not correspond to those of no species known in that region“, explains the researcher, in a statement published on .
Back at the lab, Tian and his colleagues at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, along with their collaborators, took a closer look at them. The analysis confirmed that It wasn’t about juveniles.but from adults of a species hitherto unknown.
O Brachygobius jennie It is distinguished from other bee gobies by its extreme size, less than 9 mm in length, and its pattern of dark bars on the bodyincluding four narrow bands behind the head.
“I was thrilled when Jianrong Huang and his team invited me to collaborate on describing this species, as I had never encountered such a small and peculiar bee goby,” he says Sébastien Lavouéresearcher at Universiti Sains Malaysia and co-author of , which was published in Zoosystematics and Evolution.
The researchers described the new species from 31 specimens collected on Hengqin Island, in Guangdong Province, and compared it with other species in the genus Brachygobius.
Genetic analyzes confirmed its own identityshowing a divergence of more than 10% in relation to other nearby species.
In addition to being the first bee goby identified in China, the Brachygobius jennie and the smallest known of its kind and may even be among the smallest fish in the world.
Scientists believe that the species can help study the limits of miniaturization in vertebrates, since such a marked reduction in size requires profound adaptations in anatomy, physiology and ecology.
For Tian, the tribute to Jennie combines science and personal inspiration. For ichthyology, however, the discovery has another weight: it shows that the estuaries and mangroves of southern China continue to hide undescribed species.
