Finland officially renamed hundreds of spiders to battle arachnophobia!
So Finnish universities responsible for the official names for animals renamed over 600 spiders (all spiders native to Finland) with two main goals:
- The names should be descriptive and help recognize the spider
- The names should reduce arachnophobia by being cute, diminutive forms and such.
For example what used to be "Cross spider" is now "croslet" or "crossie".
"Beach spider" is now "stripe beachy" or "strandy stripe".
"Cave opening spider" is now "Cave holet" or "holey cavey".
"Chalk stone spider" is now "chalk fanling" or "chalky fanly".
This spider didn't have a name in Finnish before but now it's know "everynimblet".
(These translations of course are by me. Finnish creates a lot of new words with suffixes and I tried to utilize English suffixes here in the way Finnish uses them to convey the meaning.)