Mizuki Sasaki, Osamu Miura, and Minoru Nakao honor Ryan by naming a newly described species of trematode after him: Philophthalmis hechingeri. Ryan had first recognized the redia and cercaria stages of this species from their first intermediate host snail in Japan in 2003. In 2007, he provided a description of those stages and gave it a provisional name (the latter because he didn’t have adult stages). Using molecular genetics, Sasaki et al. found that an adult Philophthalmus recently reported infecting the eye of a person was the same species that Ryan had described from the snail! They then experimentally got and described the adult stage, and named the species after Ryan for the original discovery and description.