A pest, in hockey parlance, is usually an agitating forward adept at, well, bugging his opponents. Think Sean Avery or Claude Lemieux.

The term is seldom applied to goalies (OK, maybe Ron Hextall), but a Boston-area researcher has decided to name a new species of wasp discovered in Kenya after Bruins netminder Tuukka Rask.

The Boston Globe reported that Robert Copeland, an entomologist who grew up in Newton, Mass., and now works out of Nairobi, was part of a team that found the new species and decided to call it Thaumatodryinus tuukkaraski after the goalie he admires.

Why? Well, the government of Rask's native Finland funded the project that led to the discovery. And a journal article to be published in April says Rask's "glove hand is as tenacious as the raptorial fore tarsus of this dryinid species."

Alright, then.

"That's funny. That's pretty neat," Rask told the Boston Globe when informed of the news.

No word yet on whether Copeland would consider trading the wasp straight-up for Andrew Raycroft.