Ex-NBA Star Wins Auction to Name Shrimp

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - Former NBA player Luc Longley won an eBay auction to name a new species of shrimp that lives on the southwest coast of Australia, according to TheScientist.com .

Longley, a 7-foot-2-inch former Chicago Bulls center who played on three championship teams with Michael Jordan in the 1990s, bid $2,900 for the right to name the shrimp.

The shrimp was discovered by Anna McCallum, now a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, while working as an assistant on a research boat in 2005. McCallum decided to auction the right to name the shrimp on eBay and donate the proceeds to the Australian Marine Conservation Society .

Several bids were submitted. Bob Rosenberry, publisher of Shrimp News International , bid $2,000 and was planning on going as high as $5,000 so he could name the shrimp after his Web site, but he backed off when he found out he couldn't name the shrimp after an entity.

"I was attracted to the beauty of the specimen and the fact that someone could name it," Rosenberry said.

Longley, who had previously supported marine conservation in his native Australia by helping to halt the construction of a resort near the Ningaloo Reef, a vast coral ecosystem off the west coast of Australia, jumped at the chance to name the shrimp.

"You get to name a species and you get to donate to charity at the same time," Longley said. "It's a fabulous concept." He named the shrimp Lebbeus clarehanna, as a birthday present to his eldest daughter, Clare Hanna Longley.

McCallum was not expecting the winning bid to come from a former NBA player.

"It was a total surprise that a basketballer would be interested in this little deep-sea shrimp," she said.

McCallum published a description of the new species and its name in a recent all-shrimp issue of the journal Zootaxa .

In 2007, at a black-tie charity auction in Indonesia, the naming rights of 10 fish were sold for more than $2 million .