There's a new insect named for Lady Gaga, and it's every bit as otherworldly as the pop diva

Meet the Mother Monster of the insect world.

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

© Provided by CNN The resemblance is uncanny, though

 Kaikaia gaga's aesthetic may hew more closely to Lady 

Gaga's punkish "Born This Way" era.

Her name is Kaikaia gaga (named for Lady Gaga, natch) and she's every bit as otherworldly as the pop diva. She wears a pair of devilish horns on her head, and she's unlike any other species in the forest.

Kaikaia gaga is a newly identified species of treehopper, an ostentatious but little-known insect group that populates most forests on Earth. A paper detailing her discovery was recently published in the journal Zootaxa, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on animal taxonomy. 

© L. Brian Stauffer/UI Public Affairs Kaikaia gaga is the newest species of treehopper, a common insect group known for its bright colors and ostentatious flair. The newest find shares a name -- and idiosyncratic style -- with Lady Gaga.

But treehoppers have never gotten their due, according to Brendan Morris, an entomology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studied and named the new insect.

K. gaga is poised to change that. 

A one-of-a-kind find

Morris knew the discovery mattered: The ruddy insect, with her pointy horns and unique body structure, more closely resembles "Old World" species endemic to Asia, Africa and Europe. But she's native to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.

So to shine a glittery spotlight on the new species, Morris named it after one of music's great iconoclasts.

"If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it's going to be a treehopper, because they've got these crazy horns, they have this wacky fashion sense about them," Morris said in a university news release. "They're unlike anything you've ever seen before."

They're certainly among the most theatrical of all insects: Treehoppers are splashed with color, and no two species look alike.

"It blows my kind that a group that is roughly 40 million years old has so much diversity of form -- diversity, I would argue, that we don't see in any other family of insects," Morris said.

CNN reached out to Morris for comment and will add their responses when they're available.
She's still an enigma

There's still a lot left to learn about K. gaga, like how she wound up in the Americas and how she evolved.

But attempts to extract DNA from her specimen haven't been successful. She was collected in the early 1990s and sat in a museum before Morris and paper co-author, Illinois Natural History Survey entomologist Christopher Dietrich, decided to take a closer look.

Soon, Morris will head to her native Nicaragua to hopefully find more of her.

Lady Gaga has yet to comment on the discovery of the eponymous insect, but K. gaga's debut was certainly well-timed: The human Gaga premiered a new single and music video at the end of February.