Real-Life Fantastic Beasts #19 and #20: Meet Cis occamy and Leptanilla voldemort!

One of my favorite talks to give at Potter festivals, particularly when addressing child audiences,  is on the topic of Real-Life Fantastic Beasts:  newly discovered species that have been given scientific names inspired by the wizarding world.  The last time I spoke on this topic, there were eighteen such critters, ranging from dinosaurs to tardigrades, all with amazing stories from their discoverers about why they were inspired by Harry Potter.  My pipe dream is to produce a children's natural history book about these beasties and happily, thirteen of the discoverers have so far agreed to be interviewed for it. 

The downside of this book project is that it keeps getting longer.  The last year has added two more species to the list, for a grand total of twenty.  Cis occamy, a beetle from Brazil, joins corinnid sac spider Attacobius demiguise and stink bug Graphorn bicornutus in the subset of species named for Newt Scamander's friends from the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie franchise, rather than Harry Potter series itself. Leptanilla voldemort is the first ant species to bear a Harry Potter-inspired name, joining two stink bugs, two beetles and three wasps as insects in this unique group. 

Learn more about these magical creatures after the jump. 

Cis occamy was described in 2023 by researchers Ayessa Rosa-Oliveira and Cristiano Lopes-Andrade. It is one of about 360 species of minute tree-fungus beetles which, as their name implies, live and feed inside fungi growing on trees. According to the researchers:

The species name is inspired by the animal Occamy, from the story “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”. The name of the creature is a reference to the Ockham’s Razor (also known as the “law of parsimony”), which is a logical principle where the best solution is the one with the fewest possible premises.

Just as the Occamy can shrink to fit in the smallest size container, the simplest scientific explanation is the one that is usually fits the observations. We can assume this bug can fit itself into very small pieces of tree fungus. 

Thanks to a hat-tip from Potter scholar Beatrice Groves, I can now add the most recently discovered species to the list:  Leptanilla voldemort, a new species of underground-dwelling ant discovered in Australia, and described in 2024 by a team led by Dr. Mark Wong, a fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Western Australia. This particular genus is described as "are darlings of myrmecologists*, for they include some of the most elusive and bizarre ants on Earth." In the ZooKeys article describing the new species, Dr. Wong explains the name: 

The species epithet pays tribute to the antagonist in the Harry Potter book series, Lord Voldemort, a terrifying wizard who, like the new ant, is slender, pale, and thrives in darkness.

There's no word on whether the Dark Lord of the ant world has a nose or not. However, according to Dr. Wong, "the elongated mandibles and large, sharp basal teeth of L. voldemort suggest that the ants are likely specialised predators." 

In any case, I have two more fantastic beasts to add to my fictional natural history museum and two more scientists to track down and beg for an interview.  It is hard to believe that, the first time I spoke on this topic, at the Chestnut Hill Harry Potter Academic Conference in 2017, I only knew about five. 

My old Hogpro posts will tell you about other species named for Harry Potter characters or concepts:

• https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/real-life-fantastic-beast-14-introducing-macrobiotus-naginae/
• https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/new-species-of-potter-wasp-named-for-mad-eye-moody/
• https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/salazars-pit-viper-another-species-named-after-out-shared-text/
• https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/chestnut-hill-wins-house-cup-for-ravenclaw-as-always/
• https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/not-all-fantastic-beasts-are-fictional/

Finally. while it is unlikely that a new species of bison, grizzly bear or wooly mammoth will be discovered anytime soon, the name Cormoran strikius remains available for something big and hairy. 

*in case this term is not in your vocabulary, a myrmecologist is a scientist who studies ants!