If a giant bọ biển (“sea bug”) in Vietnam hasn't been 'named' by an academic in a journal, does it really exist?

Yes, because they are impossible to miss. Isopods of the genus Bathynomus are 10 inches long so they are hard to miss, but discovery is a lucrative business in academia so a new one has been named and because the authors say it looks like Darth Vader from "Star Wars" they have deemed it Bathynomus vaderi. 

The Vietnamese have been eating them forever but only recently did it get the 'lobster' treatment, where it pivoted from cheap bycatch to expensive delicacy. This supergiant sea bug weighs over a kilogram and was caught near the Spratly Islands in Vietnam but is likely in various parts of the South China Sea because they have been commercially fished by trawlers operating in various deep-water parts of Biển Đông ( East Sea, Vietnamese part of the South China Sea) and offshore of provinces in the south-central coastal of Vietnam. They are sold alive in some seafood markets in Hanoi, Hồ Chí Minh City, and Đà Nẵng City. 

Yet until they are named in a journal, they don't really exist in science, so in March 2022, Hanoi University staffed purchased four from Quy Nhơn City and sent two of them to the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in the National University of Singapore. They declared it a new ("previously undescribed" is the politically correct term now) species and published it in ZooKeys.


Bathynomus vaderi. Credit: Nguyen Thanh Son

When a 10-inch bug weighing 2 pounds is only now being cataloged there is a lot left to do - and also a lot less scaremongering needed. Over 99.99^11 of all life in history is extinct and we will never know what they were. These creatures survived billions of years, they will survive fishing boats. But it is certainly fun to learn about them.


Giant sea bug. It's what's for dinner. Credit: Peter Ng, CC BY

Reference: Ng PKL, Sidabalok CM, Nguyen TS (2025) A new species of supergiant Bathynomus A. Milne-Edwards, 1879 (Crustacea, Isopoda, Cirolanidae) from Vietnam, with notes on the taxonomy of Bathynomus jamesi Kou, Chen&Li, 2017. ZooKeys 1223: 289–310. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1223.139335