Author: Pensoft Editorial Team

Zoosystematics and Evolution moves to Pensoft Publishers to combine tradition and innovation in a new publishing format

Established in 1898 as Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Zoologische Reihe by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Zoosystematics and Evolution is one of the oldest European zoological journals. The journal joined Pensoft Publishers Open Access family earlier this year and the first issue using the benefits of the new publishing platform is now a fact.

Marking the new collaboration and combining tradition and innovation, this first issue for 2014, is now available in a novel, attractive open access, semantically enriched format, while keeping at the same time the traditional PDF and print versions.

“We are excited to welcome Zoosystematics and Evolution in Pensoft. The attractive combination between historical legacy and tradition and the advanced publishing technologies of Pensoft ensures for this authoritative journal a jump right into the future!” said the Managing Director of Pensoft Publishers, Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

Being already a member of Pensoft’s family of advanced open access journals, Zoosystematics and Evolution now benefits from the innovative “platinum “open access model. For Pensoft, “platinum” open access means not just that the articles and all associated materials are free to download and that there are no author-side fees but even more so that novel approaches are used in the dissemination and reuse of published content. This publishing model includes:

• Free to read, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute
• Easy to discover and harvest by both humans and computers
• Content automatically harvested by aggregators
• Data and narrative (text) integrated to the widest extent possible
• Community peer-review and rapid publication
• Post-publication peer-review
• Easy and efficient communication with authors and reviewers
• Active promotion and dissemination of scientists’ work in the society
• A “fremium” model assuming no author-side fees within an yearly limit of number of pages

“Making published data available online is good but not sufficient. The ultimate goal is to make the journal content more attractive for the readers and authors, so that to increase visibility and re-usability of the published information to generate new knowledge”, said Dr Matthias Glaubrecht from the Museum für Naturkunde, Editor-in-Chief of Zoosystematics and Evolution.

Dr. Gregor Hagedorn, Head of the Museum’s science division “Digital World and Information Science”, adds: “Original scientific articles and the underlying scientific data have to be published in new, connected ways if we want to be able to face the challenges to mitigate global biodiversity loss. By making this journal accessible under Open Access and by joining our efforts in developing the Museum’s digital infrastructures with the novel publishing technologies invented by Pensoft, we make a significant step towards these goals.”

“I am glad to see Zoosystematics and Evolution, originally established more than a Century ago as a journal to publish studies on Museum’s collections, now serving the great task to open the treasury of biodiversity data from these collections gathered by generations of naturalists with the strong support from society over 250 years of history of explorations!” concluded Prof. Johannes Vogel, Director General of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

Additional Information:

Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity is a research museum within the Leibniz Association. It is one of the most significant research institutions worldwide in biological and geo-scientific research on evolution and biodiversity. Established in 1810, its collections comprise more than 30 million items relating to zoology, palaeontology, geology and mineralogy, which are highly significant for science as well as for the history of science and at the centre of the research performed at the Museum.

Pensoft Publishers specialize in academic and professional book and journal publishing, mostly in the field of biodiversity science and natural history. In 2008, Pensoft launched its first open-access journals named ZooKeys and BioRisk, and since then, it has taken a leadership in introducing innovations in the field of open access. On 16th of September 2013, Pensoft launched the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) and the associated Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), as the first workflow ever to put together article authoring, community peer-review, publishing and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform.

It is often difficult to decide whether two animals belong to the same or two distinct species. This can be especially challenging for animals which externally look very similar. In a recent study, published in the open access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution, scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin use genetic data and sound analysis to test if treefrogs from West and Central Africa belong to different or the same species.

Due to the fact that, when external characters are used, only size is useful to distinguish these frogs the scientists employed additional characters to determine species affiliations. One the one hand, they used genetics, and, on the other, advertisement calls of different populations. Male frogs have to attract their females via species specific calls, so call characteristics (e.g. duration, frequency) reliably tell whether animals belong to one or several species.

The two sets of populations have been previously declared as belonging to the same species based on morphological, meaning external, similarities. With their work the researchers from Berlin proved their expectations right, and revealing they were in fact working with four and not two species: two different sets of one large and one small specie, which live in West and Central Africa respectively.

In order to facilitate other researchers the verification of these results, not only genetic but also acoustic data are publicly available and the latter can be downloaded from the animal sound archive of the Museum für Naturkunde.

Species are the basis for all biological questions. Therefore, they are not only important for taxonomists but also a reference parameter for physiologists, ecologists or conservationists. Thus it is of central importance to be able to distinguish whether animals of two different populations belong to one or two distinct species. A clear showcase is an example, which was examined in a recent publication by zoologist from Berlin and Geneva.

“A colleague grouped animals to two species which were formerly known as four species, each now with a distribution across West and Central Africa. However, this contradicted known zoogeographical facts which found that forest frogs live either in West or in Central Africa but very rarely simultaneously in both regions. The clarification of that question is for example important to understand how the landscapes in these regions have developed over the past millions of years.” explains Dr. Rödel, one of the authors if the recent study.

Original Source:

Roedel M, Emmrich M, Penner J, Schmitz A, Barej M (2014) The taxonomic status of two West African Leptopelis species: L. macrotis Schiøtz, 1967 and L. spiritusnoctis Rödel, 2007 (Amphibia: Anura: Arthroleptidae). Zoosystematics and Evolution 90(1): 21-31. DOI: 10.3897/zse.90.7120

Sirenians, or sea cows, are a particular group of mammals that superficially resembles whales in having, amongst other features, a streamlined-body and horizontal tail fluke. Though belonging to the so-called marine mammals, such as whales and seals, sea cows are members of a group having a single origin that includes their closest living relatives, the proboscideans (or elephants in the broader sense).

Today, sirenians are known by only four species, but their fossil record is much more diverse documenting the transition from land-dwelling animals to fully aquatic ones. This makes fossil representatives of this group not only very fascinating, but also crucial for the understanding of the transition from life on land to the sea and the past diversity of the order Sirenia.

Considering the oldest known member of this order, Prorastomus from the Eocene (~50 Ma – Millions of years before present) of Jamaica, first fully aquatic sea cows already occurred by approximately 42 Ma, which indicates a relatively fast transitional process. Later forms still retained a small femur, which however was no more visible outside. Amongst such sirenians, one species was distributed in a shallow marine area, now occupied by Germany and Belgium, about 30 Millions of years ago in the early Oligocene. This respective species was hitherto known as Halitherium schinzii and believed to represent the only sea cow that evolved in that region to that time.

In a recent publication of the open access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution, Manja Voss from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin deals with a contrasting hypothesis of two distinct species in the early Oligocene of Central Europe. Considering the always incomplete fossil record, palaeontologists face the challenge to determine species on a material basis being as informative as possible. In the present study Manja Voss provides arguments why this is not the case with the so-called holotype, a single tooth, of H. schinzii and explains why this species name is not applicable to any currently known sirenian.

Additionally, Manja Voss emphasises that consequences are to be drawn including a morphological re-assessment of skeletal material originally assigned to this species and the requirement of new generic names for all species formerly grouped under Halitherium. Moreover, it is acknowledged that this genus does not only include unrelated species, but is also the name giving basis for a subfamily, the Halitheriinae, that is likewise far from forming a single entity. Therefore, the proposed rejection of these specific termini shall help to better handle the known diversity of the sirenian order.

Original Source:

Voss M (2014) On the invalidity of Halitherium schinzii Kaup, 1838 (Mammalia, Sirenia), with comments on systematic consequences. Zoosystematics and Evolution 90(1): 87-93. DOI: 10.3897/zse.90.7421

Six new species of Dracula ants from the Malagasy region have been discovered by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences. The discoveries, by postdoctoral fellow Masashi Yoshimura from Japan and curator of entomology Brian L. Fisher, represent a completely new twist in the typically rigid caste system of ants, where anatomy is typically destiny. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

“The genus Mystrium is the most mysterious group within the bizarre Dracula ants.” said Yoshimura.

Mystrium species have unique features such as long, spatulate mandibles that snap together (Gronenberg et al. 1998); wingless queens that in some undetermined species are even smaller than workers (Molet et al. 2007); and large, wingless individuals intermediate between workers and queens, which behave like queens (Molet et al. 2012).

“Mystrium was a difficult group to identify because of the remarkable variation within each species.” Yoshimura said.

“Our team has explored Madagascar and its surrounding islands for 20 years and collected thousands of specimens to solve the mysteries of Mystrium.” said Fisher, an expert on Malagasy ants.

Fisher explained why Mystrium poses such a fiendish problem Mystrium to taxonomists, who identify new and different species. “Mystrium has three different styles in reproduction within a single genus, and the role of an individual in a colony is not always obvious by its appearance. Ants that look similar may be minor workers in one species but queens in another species.” This makes classifying the Dracula ants extremely difficult, he said.

“The discovery of the division of females into major and minor forms were the key to solving this complicated puzzle.” explained Yoshimura. “We found that all species in Mystrium share a common original components consisting of male, usual large queen, and major and minor workers. Furthermore, the major or minor workers develop as reproductives in some species and even take over queen’s position. They are revolutionaries finding in the anatomy-is-destiny world of ants! Taxonomists usually compare the anatomy of ants of the same caste to find differences between species. But in the case of the genus Mystrium, we need to compare individuals from the same original phenotype, not on the their current functional role (caste).” he said.

The authors have reclassified all species into three subgroups based on the reproductive styles, and developed a new taxonomic framework for this complicated group featuring innovative pictorial keys to the species. The illustrations include color photographs showing every hair in focus (produced using a computer-assisted method called auto-montage), and drawings for all castes. The paper looks more like a picture book than your average scientific treatise. “I learned drawing techniques from Japanese manga.” Yoshimura says.

“To name three of the species we chose words that evoke the air of mystery around this genus, calling them Mystrium labyrinth, Mystrium mirror, and Mystrium shadow.” Yoshimura said.

Original source:

Yoshimura M, Fisher BL (2014) A revision of the ant genus Mystrium in the Malagasy region with description of six new species and remarks on Amblyopone and Stigmatomma (Hymenoptera, Formicidae, Amblyoponinae). ZooKeys 394: 1-99. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.394.6446

 

Additional Information:

Gronenberg W, Hölldobler B, Alpert GD (1998) Jaws that snap: control of mandible movements in the ant Mystrium. J Insect Physiol 44: 241-253. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1910(97)00145-5

Molet M, Peeters C, Fisher BL (2007) Winged queens replaced by reproductives smaller than workers in Mystrium ants. Naturwissenschaften 94: 280-287. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00114-006-0190-2

Molet M, Wheeler DE, Peeters C (2012) Evolution of Novel Mosaic Castes in Ants: Modularity, Phenotypic Plasticity, and Colonial Buffering. Am Nat 180: 328-341. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667368

New species discovery, description and data sharing in less than 30 days

Researchers and the public can now have immediate access to data underlying discovery of new species of life on Earth, under a new streamlined system linking taxonomic research with open data publication.

The partnership paves the way for unlocking and preserving a wealth of ‘small data’ backing up research conclusions, which often become lost within a few years of an article’s publication in an academic journal.

In the first example of the new collaboration in action, the Biodiversity Data Journal carries a peer-reviewed description of a new species of spider discovered during a field course in Borneo just one month ago. At the same time, the data showing location of the spider’s occurrence in nature are automatically harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and richer data such as images and the species description are exported to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

This contrasts with an average ‘shelf life’ of twenty-one years between field discovery of a new species and its formal description and naming, according to a recent study in Current Biology.

A group of scientists and students discovered the new species of spider during a field course in Borneo, supervised by Jeremy Miller and Menno Schilthuizen from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, based in Leiden, the Netherlands. The species was described and submitted online from the field to the Biodiversity Data Journal through a satellite internet connection, along with the underlying data . The manuscript was peer-reviewed and published within two weeks of submission. On the day of publication, GBIF and EOL have harvested and included the data in their respective platforms.

The new workflow established between GBIF, EOL and Pensoft Publishers’ Biodiversity Data Journal, with the support of the Swiss NGO Plazi, automatically exports treatment and occurrence data into a Darwin Core Archive, a standard format used by GBIF and other networks to share data from many different sources. This means GBIF can extract these data on the day of the article’s publication, making them immediately available to science and the public through its portal and web services, further enriching the biodiversity data already freely accessible through the GBIF network. Similarly, the information and multimedia resources become accessible via EOL’s species pages.

One of the main purposes of the partnership is to ensure that such data remain accessible for future use in research. A recent study published in Current Biology found that 80 % of scientific data are lost in less than 10 years following their creation.

Donald Hobern, GBIF’s Executive Secretary, commented: “A great volume of extremely important information about the world’s species is effectively inaccessible, scattered across thousands of small datasets carefully curated by taxonomic researchers. I find it very exciting that this new workflow will help preserve these ‘small data’ and make them immediately available for re-use through our networks.”

“Re-use of data published on paper or in PDF format is a huge challenge in all branches of science”, said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing director of Pensoft and founder of the Biodiversity Data Journal. “This problem has been tackled firstly by our partners from Plazi who created a workflow to extract data from legacy literature and submit it to GBIF. The workflow currently launched by GBIF, EOL and the Biodiversity Data Journal radically shortens the way from publication of data to their sharing and re-use and makes the whole process cost efficient.”, added Prof. Penev.

The elaboration of the workflow from BDJ and Plazi to GBIF through Darwin Core Archive was supported by the EU-funded project EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, grant No 308454). The basic concept has been initially discussed and outlined in the course of the pro-iBiosphere project (Coordination and policy development in preparation for a European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, addressing Acquisition, Curation, Synthesis, Interoperability and Dissemination, grant No 312848).

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

 

Additional information:

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international open data infrastructure, funded by governments. It allows anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on Earth, shared across national boundaries via the Internet. By encouraging and helping institutions to publish data according to common standards, GBIF enables research not possible before, and informs better decisions to conserve and sustainably use the biological resources of the planet.

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) operates as an ongoing collaboration among its international partners with the mission to raise awareness and understanding of living nature. With additional support from a global network of content partners, curators and users, EOL works to provide free, open, multilingual, digital access to trusted information on all known species.

Pensoft Publishers specialize in academic and professional book and journal publishing, mostly in the field of biodiversity science and natural history. On 16th of September 2013, Pensoft launched the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) and the associated Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), as the first workflow ever to put together article authoring, community peer-review, publishing and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform.

Plazi GmbH is a service SME owned by the Swiss based not for profit Plazi Verein, supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. Plazi GmbH has been founded to provide services, training and consulting in the domain of digitization, open access publishing and access to taxonomy related published content.

 

Contacts:

Tim Hirsch
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
Email: thirsch@gbif.org
Tel.: +45 28751485

Jeremy Miller
Naturalis Biodiversity Center
Email: jeremy.miller@naturalis.nl

Lyubomir Penev
Pensoft Publishers
Email: penev@pensoft.net

As a spin-off (pun intended) of their Tropical Biodiversity course in Malaysian Borneo, a team of biology students discover a new spider species, build a makeshift taxonomy lab, write a joint publication and send it off to a major taxonomic journal.

Discovering a new spider species was not what she had anticipated when she signed up for her field course in Tropical Biodiversity, says Elisa Panjang, a Malaysian master’s student from Universiti Malaysia Sabah. She is one of twenty students following the course, organised by Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands, and held in the Danau Girang Field Centre in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The aim of the one-month course, say organisers Vincent Merckx and Menno Schilthuizen, is to teach the students about how the rich tapestry of the tropical lowland rainforest’s ecosystem is woven.

Besides charismatic species, such as the orang-utans that the students encounter every day in the forest, the tropical ecosystem consists of scores of unseen organisms, and the course focus is on these “small things that run the world”—such as the tiny orb-weaving spiders of the tongue-twistingly named family Symphytognathidae. These one-millimetre-long spiders build tiny webs that they suspend between dead leaves on the forest floor. “When we started putting our noses to the ground we saw them everywhere.” says Danish student Jennie Burmester enthusiastically. What they weren’t prepared for was that the webs turned out to be the work of an unknown species, as spider specialist Jeremy Miller, an instructor on the course, quickly confirmed.

The students then decided to make the official naming and description of the species a course project. They rigged the field centre’s microscopes with smartphones to produce images of the tiny spider’s even tinier genitals (using cooking oil from the station’s kitchen to make them more translucent), dusted the spider’s webs with puffs of corn flour (also from the kitchen) to make them stand out and described the way they were built. They also put a spider in alcohol as “holotype”, the obligatory reference specimen for the naming of any new species—which is to be stored in the collection of Universiti Malaysia Sabah. Finally, a dinner-time discussion yielded a name for this latest addition to the tree of life: Crassignatha danaugirangensis, after the field centre’s idyllic setting at the Danau Girang oxbow lake.

All data and images were then compiled into a scientific paper, which, via the station’s satellite link, was submitted to the Biodiversity Data Journal, a leading online journal for quick dissemination of new biodiversity data. Even though thousands of similarly-sized spider species still await discovery, Miller thinks the publication is an important one. “It means we provide a quick anchor point for further work on this species; the naming of a species is the only way to make sure we’re all singing from the same score.” he says.

Peter Schalk, Executive Secretary of Species 2000 / CoL, and GBIF Chair, comments: “This is a fine example of how the taxonomic world is embracing the digital era. Open data and rapid publication form the key for sharing information which in turn provides valuable input for responsible management of the world’s biosphere. One of the most important achievements of this paper is that all data associated with this species have been harvested from the article and collated with other data on GBIF and Encyclopedia of Life right on the day of publication, through a specially designed format called Darwin Core Archive. This is indeed a “real time” data publishing!”

Field station director Benoît Goossens adds: “This tiny new spider is a nice counterpoint to the large-mammal work we’re doing and having it named after the field centre is extremely cool.” The Danau Girang Field Centre is located in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, a strip of rainforest along Sabah’s major river, squeezed in by vast oil palm plantations on either side. Despite intensive search, the students could not find the new spider in the plantations.

Original Source:

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

A Malaysian-Dutch team of biologists have catalogued all 31 species of the tiny, but oh so pretty snail genus Plectostoma from West-Malaysia, Sumatra, and Thailand. Ten species are new to science, but some of those are going extinct as they are being discovered.

The study was carried out by PhD student Thor-Seng Liew of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, and three colleagues. Liew, who is on study leave from Universiti Malaysia Sabah, spent four years studying the distribution, shell shape, and genetics of these minuscule snails. He is still working on the species from Borneo, where Plectostoma is exceptionally diverse, but in the new paper, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, he first gets the species from the rest of Asia out of the way.

The snails are special for several reasons, says Liew. ‘First of all, they flaunt all shell-coiling rules, by having very irregularly coiled and ornamented shells, making them look like microjewelry.’ Liew used a so-called micro-CT-scanner, which produces three-dimensional X-rays of very tiny objects, to investigate the exact shapes of the shells. This allowed him to recognise 31 species, ten of which were new to science.

Another peculiarity is that they only live on limestone hills. In Southeast Asia, such hills are usually few and far between, and the snails that manage to colonise them are completely isolated. This, in turn, has caused a lot of “endemism”: many Plectostoma species only occur on a single hill and nowhere else on earth.

But their endemism may also be their downfall, as Liew found out. Limestone hills are ‘sitting ducks’ for mining companies, and many are being quarried away for cement, taking their unique snails with them to their grave. One species, Plectostoma sciaphilum, is already extinct: its home was turned into concrete around 2003. Similar fates await at least six more species. One of these, P. tenggekensis (named and described in the new paper) occurs only on Bukit Tenggek, which the authors forecast to be completely gone by the end of 2014.

To highlight the plight of these unsung victims, the authors named several of the new species after conservationists and politicians who have fought for the preservation of Malaysia’s endangered limestone hills.

Original source:

Liew T-S, Vermeulen JJ, bin Marzuki ME, Schilthuizen M (2014) A cybertaxonomic revision of the micro-landsnail genus Plectostoma Adam (Mollusca, Caenogastropoda, Diplommatinidae), from Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Indochina. ZooKeys 393: 1. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.393.6717

A scientist has discovered 19 new species of praying mantis from Central and South America. The new species of bark mantises were discovered in tropical forests and also found among existing museum collections. Dr. Gavin Svenson, curator of invertebrate zoology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, described the new species and published a revision of the genus Liturgusa in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Svenson collected the insects from eight countries in Central and South America, as well as gathered hundreds of specimens from 25 international museums in North America, South America and Europe. Many of the newly described species are known only from a few specimens collected before 1950 from locations that are now heavily impacted by agriculture or development.

“This group, the Neotropical bark mantises, are incredibly fast runners that live on the trunks and branches of trees.” said Svenson of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “This violates the common perception of praying mantises being slow and methodical hunters.”

Like most praying mantises, they are highly camouflage. However, this group is flattened in appearance and is very difficult to locate because of their adept mimicry of bark, moss and lichen. They often evade discovery by running to the opposite side of the tree before being noticed, an escape tactic also seen in many tree dwelling lizards.

“This is an amazing behavior for an insect because it shows that they are not only relying on camouflage like most insects but are constantly monitoring their environment and taking action to run and hide.” said Svenson. “In addition, some species leap off the tree trunk to avoid capture and play dead after fluttering down to the forest floor since none of the species are strong fliers.”

As highly visual predators, the bark mantis species appear to be active hunters that pursue prey as opposed to ambush hunters that wait for prey to come close. Also, like a similar bark mantis group from Australia (Ciulfina), this Neotropical group does not appear to exhibit cannibalism, which is an often misunderstood characteristic exhibited by some praying mantis species.

The research brings to light a previously unknown diversity of bark mantises. It indicates that there are many more species to discover.

“Based on this study, we can predict that mantis groups with similar habitat specialization in Africa, Asia and Australia will also be far more diverse than what is currently known,” said Svenson. “Many of these groups have never been studied other than by the scientists that originally described some of the species, which in some cases is more than 100 years ago. This is exciting because enormous potential exists for advancing our understanding of praying mantis diversity just by looking within our existing museum collections and conducting a few field expeditions.”

The discovery of these 19 new species triples the diversity of the group that scientists thought had only a few species with broad geographical ranges. The research indicates that most species are far more restricted in their locations within regions of Central and South America. This increased diversity and better measure of distribution has broad implications for conservation since many of the species were found in or near natural areas that may or may not be protected. The conservation status of some of the new mantises found in museum collections is not known since they have not been seen since originally collected in the early 1900s and could be highly threatened or even extinct.

Among the new species, Liturgusa algorei, is named for Albert Arnold “Al” Gore Jr., former vice president of the United States of America, to honor his environmental activism and efforts to raise public awareness of global climate change. Liturgusa krattorum is named for Martin and Chris Kratt, hosts and creators of Kratts’ Creatures and Wild Kratts, both of which provide children with entertaining and accurate programming on animal biology. Liturgusa fossetti is named in honor of the late James Stephen Fossett for his inspirational dedication to exploration. Liturgusa bororum is named for the Bora people, a group of people native to parts of the Amazon basin in northern Peru, Columbia and Brazil. Liturgusa tessae is named for Svenson’s daughter, Tessa. Liturgusa zoae is named for Svenson’s daughter, Zoey.

Svenson’s research is focused on the evolutionary patterns of relationship, distribution and complex features of praying mantises. His current research project aims to align new sources of relationship evidence (DNA sequence data) with morphology and other features to create a new and accurate classification system for praying mantises that reflects true evolutionary relationships.

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants to Gavin J. Svenson, Jason Cryan and Michael Whiting. The project was also supported by the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies of Brigham Young University, the New York State Museum and the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris.

 

About The Cleveland Museum of Natural History:

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, incorporated in 1920, is one of the finest institutions of its kind in North America. It is noted for its collections, research, educational programs and exhibits. The collections encompass more than 5 million artifacts and specimens, and research of global significance focuses on 10 natural science disciplines. The Museum conserves biological diversity through the protection of more than 5,800 acres of natural areas. It promotes health education with local programs and distance learning that extends across the globe. Its GreenCityBlueLake Institute is a center of thought and practice for the design of green and sustainable cities. http://www.cmnh.org

 

Original Source:

Svenson GJ (2014) Revision of the Neotropical bark mantis genus Liturgusa Saussure, 1869 (Insecta, Mantodea, Liturgusini). ZooKeys 390: 1–214. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.390.6661

Armored spiders are medium to small species that derive their name from the complex pattern of the plates covering their abdomen strongly resembling body armor. Lurking in the darkness of caves In Southeast China, scientists discover and describe five new species of these exciting group of spiders. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

The common name armored spiders is given to the engaging family Tetrablemmidae. Distinguished by their peculiar armor-like abdominal pattern, these tropical and subtropical spiders are mainly collected from litter and soil, but like the newly described species some live in caves. Some cave species, but also some soil inhabitants, show typical adaptations of cave spiders, such as loss of eyes. The genus Tetrablemma, for example, to which two of the new species belong, is distinguished by having only 4 eyes.

All these new spiders are collected from the South China Karst, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The South China Karst spans the provinces of Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan. It is noted for its karst features and landscapes as well as rich biodiversity. UNESCO describes the South China Karst as “unrivalled in terms of the diversity of its karst features and landscapes.”

Colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Professor Shuqiang LI have investigated more than 2000 caves in the South China Karst. Several hundred new species of cave spiders are reported by Shuqiang Li and colleagues. As a result, the total known spider species of China increased from 2300 species to 4300 species in the last 10 years.

Original Source:

Lin Y, Li S (2014) New cave-dwelling armored spiders (Araneae, Tetrablemmidae) from Southwest China. ZooKeys 388: 35. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.388.5735

Who said that there is only sand in the deserts? Not quite desert roses, two new species of desert poppies from North America prove such statements wrong with their simple beauty. The newly described plants are found in the deserts of California and Arizona and have a vibrant yellow colored inflorescences, typical for all the desert dwellers from the Eschscholzia genus of the poppy family. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

Most commonly known for the iconic California Poppy, the state flower of California, Eschscholzia is a genus in the poppy family Papaveraceae that previously held 12 species. The genus is native to the mainland and islands of western North America in both the United States and Mexico, but the type species, Eschscholzia californica, is commonly spread and has invaded Mediterranean regions around the world.

Shannon Still discovered the new species while studying Eschscholzia for his dissertation research at the University of California Davis. “What is interesting about these new species is that, while people have been collecting these plants for decades, they were not recognized as something different.” Still said. “They were always confused for existing species. This confusion led to my study of the group, and ultimately, recognizing something new. I imagine there are many more desert plant species that are also understudied.”

The two new desert species E. androuxii and E. papastillii are found in desert washes, flats, and slopes growing in coarse and sandy soil across California deserts and parts of Arizona. Eschscholzia androuxii has a small range, is fairly uncommon and is suggested that it be listed as a rare plant species. The wide distribution of the other species, suggests there are no conservation threats at the moment.

Still acknowledges the resources that lay the foundation for his research. “My work would have been impossible without a strong system of specimen and data sharing from herbaria around the world, and especially in California. I used the herbarium specimens to compare with collections I had made from the field, to establish important characters used to identify the species, and to examine the species’ geographic ranges. This work highlights the value that herbarium collections play in cataloging, understanding and conserving our biological diversity.”

Original Source:

Still SM (2014) Two new desert Eschscholzia (Papaveraceae) from southwestern North America. PhytoKeys 35: 45. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.3