BEIJING: A Chinese scientist has named 16 new spider species after songs by popular `Mandopop` musician Jay Chou. Mi Xiaoqi, a professor at Tongren University in China`s southwestern Guizhou province, listed the newly discovered arachnids in a paper published in the academic journal Zoological Research: Diversity and Conservation.

The paper, published in December, has gone viral since being discovered by netizens this year, with a related hashtag on microblogging platform Weibo racking up over 26 million views since Wednesday.

Weibo users have since dubbed Mi, 44, the `Ultimate Fan`. One of the arachnids the 3.5-millimetre long Cyclosa xingqing sp. nov.

or `Starry Mood spider` is named after a hit love song from Chou`s debut album `Jay` released in 2000. Others are named after similarly beloved tunes, including `Rainbow spider`, `Dragon Fist spider`, and `Excuse spider`.

Taiwan-born Chou, renowned for his dramatic romance ballads and pop beats, is one of the world`s most popular Mandarinlanguage artists having sold over 30 million records. The 45-year-old has been a household name on the Chinese mainland and beyond for over two decades.

Now his songs will be immortalised as theBEIJING: A Chinese scientist has named 16 new spider species after songs by popular `Mandopop` musician Jay Chou. Mi Xiaoqi, a professor at Tongren University in China`s southwestern Guizhou province, listed the newly discovered arachnids in a paper published in the academic journal Zoological Research: Diversity and Conservation.

The paper, published in December, has gone viral since being discovered by netizens this year, with a related hashtag on microblogging platform Weibo racking up over 26 million views since Wednesday.

Weibo users have since dubbed Mi, 44, the `Ultimate Fan`. One of the arachnids the 3.5-millimetre long Cyclosa xingqing sp. nov.

or `Starry Mood spider` is named after a hit love song from Chou`s debut album `Jay` released in 2000. Others are named after similarly beloved tunes, including `Rainbow spider`, `Dragon Fist spider`, and `Excuse spider`.

Taiwan-born Chou, renowned for his dramatic romance ballads and pop beats, is one of the world`s most popular Mandarinlanguage artists having sold over 30 million records. The 45-year-old has been a household name on the Chinese mainland and beyond for over two decades.

Now his songs will be immortalised as thenames of the eight-legged critters that Mi and his colleagues recently discovered in China`s Yunnan province.

The Secret Code spider, a 2.36 millimetre yellowish brown web-weaving arachnid, is named after Chou`s 2002 love song featured on his acclaimed album `The Eight Dimensions`.

It`s unclear how the song, in which Chou croons `Don`t ever leave, you are missing the missing piece in my world, relates to the spider.

Excuse spider, a fuzzy brown and white critter, shares its name with a track from Chou`s 2004 album `Common Jasmine orange`, the best-selling physical album in China this century according to Guinness World Records.

Mi, who published the paper with fellow researchers Wang Cheng and Li Shuqiang, has been a Jay Chou fan since his undergraduate days, according to state media outlet Xinhua.

`Naming spiders after Jay Chou`s songs brings scientific research closer to the public. I hope more people will pay attention to scientific research and support ecological protection, he told Xinhua.

This is not the first time Chou`s name has been used for scientific discoveries. In 2011, astronomers in Taiwan named an asteroid after the singer.-AFP