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By Adam Cancryn, Brenda Goodman, Jennifer Hansler, Deidre McPhillips, CNN

(CNN) — The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is dispatching staffers to meet the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship in the Canary Islands, with plans to escort its American passengers back to the US aboard a charter flight, four sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Another CDC team has been dispatched to meet the passengers in Nebraska, one source said. Passengers are expected to be placed into quarantine there as part of an effort to ensure that the virus does not have a chance to spread, two sources said. Nebraska is home to the National Quarantine Unit, a federally funded quarantine facility, as well as the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.

“Nebraska Medicine and UNMC remain in close coordination with national partners regarding the evolving situation with the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship,” Nebraska Medicine said in a statement. “We cannot discuss specific communications at this time, but, our specialized teams, including the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit and National Quarantine Unit, are staffed and ready, if needed, to safely provide care while protecting our staff and the community.”

The US State Department is arranging the repatriation flight in coordination with the CDC, US Department of Health and Human Services and government of Spain, a State Department spokesperson confirmed. One source said the charter is a specialized aircraft with a biocontainment unit, similar to those used during Covid-19 evacuations.

The department is “in direct communication with Americans on board and are prepared to provide consular assistance as soon as the ship arrives in Tenerife, Spain,” the State Department spokesperson said.

The Trump administration was expected to publicly detail its plan as early as Friday, one of the people familiar with the matter said, though they cautioned the timing remained fluid.

There are an estimated 17 Americans on board the cruise ship, according to its operator, Oceanwide Expeditions.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

President Donald Trump on Thursday indicated that the administration would soon release more information on its work to contain the disease, telling reporters that it is “very much, we hope, under control.”

“It was the ship, and I think we’re going to make a full report about it tomorrow,” he said.

Five states — Arizona, California Georgia, Texas and Virginia — are already monitoring seven passengers who previously disembarked from the ship. Health officials told CNN that none are experiencing symptoms. New Jersey also said it is monitoring two people who were potentially exposed to a person infected with hantavirus after departing MV Hondius. They are not experiencing hantavirus symptoms.

Eight hantavirus cases — all among passengers on the MV Hondius — have already been identified. Among them, three people have died.

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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — Scientists have named a newly identified species of wasp after David Attenborough to honor the legendary naturalist and broadcaster’s 100th birthday.

The wasp, called Attenboroughnculus tau, had been sitting in the collection of London’s Natural History Museum since 1983 after its discovery in southern Chile’s Valdivia province.

It’s not unusual for specimens to spend a long time in museum archives before being properly analyzed or classified, according to Gavin Broad, principal curator of insects at London’s Natural History Museum. Broad led a study on the species that was published Thursday in the Journal of Natural History.

“Taxonomic discovery is sometimes really quick — you find something and you describe it right away,” he said. “But sometimes it’s quite slow, and you just work methodically through the collections that other people have accumulated over the years.”

Augustijn De Ketelaere, a volunteer and study coauthor, spotted Attenboroughnculus tau during a survey of the museum’s ichneumon wasps — a large and geographically widespread group of parasitic wasps that contains about 25,000 identified species, with an estimated 75,000 more yet to be named.

A detailed examination of the 43-year-old specimen revealed that it was not just a previously unknown species but also a previously unidentified genus — a higher level taxonomic rank that refers to a group of related species.

“We looked at it, and we had a good look at all its relatives,” Broad said, “and we realized it’s got a combination of characters that meant it wouldn’t fit anywhere. So, we had to describe a new genus to accommodate this lovely little species.”

The wasp is 3.5 millimeters (0.13 of an inch) long, with a slender, curved abdomen, and belongs to a small subfamily of wasps native to Chile, Argentina, Australia and New Guinea.

“It’s a really weird distribution, because these are relics of a time when a supercontinent called Gondwana still existed,” said Broad, referring to a landmass that was made up of what are now South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica, and started breaking up about 180 million years ago.

“These little wasps have clung on to what used to be Gondwana, and they’ve probably gone extinct in the rest of the world.”

An inspiration for many

Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus devised the system for naming species, called binomial nomenclature, in the 1750s. It uses two Latin or latinized words: the first identifying the genus and the second the species. In the case of Attenboroughnculus tau, the tribute to the naturalist’s name is in the genus, while the species name tau refers to the markings on the insect’s abdomen, which resemble a T or the Greek letter tau.

Taxonomy is important not only as the foundation of biology, but also because a species can’t be protected against the threat of extinction if it isn’t named. An ongoing shortage of taxonomists exists, with an extensive backlog of species waiting to be named.

However, naming a species is not particularly complicated.

“There’s not a lot of rules — taxonomy is quite open like that,” Broad said. “There’s a lot of guidelines, like don’t name things after really awful people or after yourself, because it just looks bad.

“Naming a genus after somebody is quite special, because a genus is mo