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Smithsonian scientists describe a colorful new species of small coral reef sea bass from depths of 182–241 m off Curaçao, southern Caribbean. With predominantly yellow body and fins, the new species, Liopropoma santi, closely resembles the other two “golden basses” found together with it at Curaçao: L. aberrans and L. olneyi.

The scientists originally thought there was a single species of golden bass on deep reefs off Curaçao, but DNA data, distinct color patterns, and morphology revealed three. The study describing one of those, L. santi—the deepest known species of Liopropoma in the Atlantic Ocean, was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Dr. Carole C. Baldwin and Dr. D. Ross Robertson, who discovered the new species, propose the common name “spot-tail golden bass” to distinguish it from the other golden bass species, referencing the dark spot on the lower part of the tail fin. It appears to be more closely related to the other new deep-reef golden bass from Curaçao, Liopropoma olneyi, and members of a related genus, Bathyanthias, than to species of Liopropoma such as the candy and peppermint basses inhabiting shallower reefs.

“With Bathyanthias falling out within the western Atlantic Liopropoma clade,” notes Baldwin, “further study of the classification of this group is needed.” The researchers also note that related groups of Liopropoma species have different depth distributions, suggesting that depth may have played a role in their evolution.

To collect deep-reef fish specimens, the scientists are diving to 300 m off Curaçao using a manned submersible, the Curasub. “This underexplored zone between 60 and 300 m in the tropical southern Caribbean is revealing extraordinary biodiversity, including a wealth of new species of beautifully colored fishes,” says Baldwin. “It’s a zone that science has largely missed because it’s too deep to access using scuba gear, and deep-diving submersibles rarely stop at such shallow depths.”

As part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP), Smithsonian scientists are working to improve our knowledge of Caribbean deep-reef biodiversity.

Original Source:

Baldwin CC, Robertson RD (2014) A new Liopropoma sea bass (Serranidae, Epinephelinae, Liopropomini) from deep reefs off Curaçao, southern Caribbean, with comments on depth distributions of western Atlantic liopropomins. ZooKeys 409: 71–92. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.409.7249

The recently extinct Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis) was one of three species of monk seal in the world. Its relationship to the Mediterranean and Hawaiian monk seals, both living but endangered, has never been fully understood. Through DNA analysis and skull comparisons, however, Smithsonian scientists and colleagues have now clarified the Caribbean species’ place on the seal family tree and created a completely new genus. The team’s findings are published in the scientific journal ZooKeys.

First reported by Columbus in 1494, the Caribbean monk seal ranged throughout the Caribbean with an estimated population in the hundreds of thousands. Unrestricted hunting in the 19th century, however, caused a rapid decline in numbers. The last definite sighting of a Caribbean monk seal was in 1952, making it the most recent extinction of a marine mammal in the Western Hemisphere.

To find the answers about the classification of the Caribbean monk seal, the scientists turned to DNA extracted from century-old monk seal skins in the Smithsonian’s collections. For the DNA comparisons, the Smithsonian team worked with scientists at the Leibniz Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany and Fordham University in New York. Their analyses showed that the Caribbean species was more closely related to the Hawaiian rather than the Mediterranean monk seal. It also showed that Caribbean and Hawaiian monk seals split into distinct species around 3 to 4 million years ago―the same time the Panamanian Isthmus closed off the connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which would have naturally separated the two.

“Scientists have long understood that monk seals are very special animals,” said Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “This study is exciting because it gives us a clearer view of their evolution and provides us with new context that highlights the importance of conserving these remarkable and endangered seals.”

The team’s analysis determined that the molecular and morphological differences between the Mediterranean species and the two New World species (Caribbean and Hawaiian) were profound. This led them to classify the Caribbean and Hawaiian monk seals in a newly named genus, Neomonachus. This remarkable discovery is the first time in more than 140 years that a new genus has been recognized amongst modern pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses).

“We occasionally identify new species of larger mammals, like the olinguito we announced last year,” said Graham Slater, co-author and Peter Buck Post Doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian. “But to be able to name a new genus, and a seal genus at that, is incredibly rare and a great honor.”

Monk seals, as a group, are unusual among seals in being adapted for life in warm water. With the Caribbean species now extinct, the Hawaiian monk seal is the last surviving species of the genus Neomonachus, as the Mediterranean species is in its genus, Monachus. Both species are listed as “critically endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. With about 1,200 Hawaiian but less than 600 Mediterranean monk seals left, they are some of the rarest mammals on Earth.

Original Source:

Scheel DM, Slater GJ, Kolokotronis S-O, Potter CW, Rotstein DS, Tsangaras K, Greenwood AD, Helgen KM (2014) Biogeography and taxonomy of extinct and endangered monk seals illuminated by ancient DNA and skull morphology. ZooKeys 409: 1-33. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.409.6244

In recent years the cattle egret (Bubulcus ibis) has colonized American continent. Invasive species are a worldwide problem and studies are devoted to assess the damage they cause to local species populations. Thus, the process of colonization of a new territory that has continental dimensions such as Brazil offers an excellent opportunity to examine how non-native species disperse, adapt and survive. A new study of the colonization patterns of the cattle egret in Brazil, published in the open access journal NeoBiota, offers a new take on the study of alien species.

The cattle egret primarily inhabits grassland habitats and forages in close association with grazing animals, such as cattle and other livestock. This bird is native to tropical and subtropical Africa, southern Europe and western Asia. The populations of cattle egret in Brazil are alien to the region but unlike a number of bird species that have been introduced to non-native areas through human intervention, the cattle egret is known to have established and expanded to the Americas without such intervention.

The first sightings in the New World were reported for Suriname between 1877 and 1882 in the North of South America, followed by sightings in British Guiana and Colombia and subsequent expansion throughout the Americas. In Brazil, the cattle egret was first recorded in the northern region of the country in 1964, feeding along with buffalos on Marajo Island in the state of Para.

Novel colonizers can cause problems outside of their native range. While the cattle egret is not currently a threat to native fauna in Brazil throughout most of its geographic distribution, it has the potential to produce adverse effects, as evidenced by its occupation of island environments. For example, in the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, the cattle egret drives adult native seabirds away from their nests in breeding colonies and predates the Noronha skink, which is endemic to the archipelago.

Understanding how the cattle egret colonized Brazil is crucial for the better understanding of dispersal patterns of bird populations and their interaction with the local species. Explaining the colonization of the Americas by the cattle egret is a challenging task due to the lack of sufficient information and reports on entrance time, locality, and number of events. Comparisons between native and non-native populations can provide a ‘natural’ experimental approach to clarify the biological and environmental factors that may contribute to range expansion and adaptation to climate change, and to reveal mechanisms by which organisms respond to novel ecological and environmental pressures.

Original Source:

Moralez-Silva E, Del Lama SN (2014) Colonization of Brazil by the cattle egret (Bubulcus ibis) revealed by mitochondrial DNA. In: Capdevila-Argüelles L, Zilletti B (Eds) Proceedings of 7th NEOBIOTA conference, Pontevedra, Spain. NeoBiota 21: 49–63. doi: 10.3897/neobiota.21.4966

Scientists from the University of the Philippines, Los Baños have discovered a new plant species with an unusual lifestyle — it eats nickel for a living — accumulating up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without itself being poisoned, says Professor Edwino Fernando, lead author of the report. Such an amount is a hundred to a thousand times higher than in most other plants. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

The new species is called Rinorea niccolifera, reflecting its ability to absorb nickel in very high amounts. Nickel hyperaccumulation is such a rare phenomenon with only about 0.5–1% of plant species native to nickel-rich soils having been recorded to exhibit the ability. Throughout the world, only about 450 species are known with this unusual trait, which is still a small proportion of the estimated 300,000 species of vascular plants.

The new species, according to Dr Marilyn Quimado, one of the lead scientists of the research team, was discovered on the western part of Luzon Island in the Philippines, an area known for soils rich in heavy metals.

“Hyperacccumulator plants have great potentials for the development of green technologies, for example, ‘phytoremediation’ and ‘phytomining'”, explains Dr Augustine Doronila of the School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne, who is also co-author of the report.

Phytoremediation refers to the use of hyperacccumulator plants to remove heavy metals in contaminated soils. Phytomining, on the other hand, is the use of hyperacccumulator plants to grow and harvest in order to recover commercially valuable metals in plant shoots from metal-rich sites.

The field surveys and laboratory work of the scientists are part of the research project funded by the Department of Science and Technology – Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (DOST-PCIEERD).

 

Original source:

Fernando ES, Quimado MO, Doronila AI (2014) Rinorea niccolifera (Violaceae), a new, nickel-hyperaccumulating species from Luzon Island, Philippines. PhytoKeys 37: 1–13. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.37.7136

Some Ecuadorian tribes were famous for making mummified shrunken heads from the remains of their conquered foes. Field work in the cloud forests of Ecuador by Professor Scott Shaw, University of Wyoming, Laramie, and colleagues, has resulted in the discovery of 24 new species of Aleiodes wasps that mummify caterpillars. The research by Eduardo Shimbori, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil, and Scott Shaw, was recently published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Among the 24 new insect species described by Shimbori and Shaw, several were named after famous people including the comedians and television hosts Jimmy Fallon, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as the Ecuadorian artist Eduardo Kingman, American poet Robert Frost, and Colombian singer and musician, Shakira.

The Shakira wasp causes its host caterpillar to bend and twist in an unusual way, which reminded the authors of belly-dancing, for which the South American performer is also famous. In a previous work, Shaw had named a species after David Letterman.

“These wasps are very small organisms, being only 4 to 9 millimeters long, but they have an enormous impact on forest ecology.” Shaw said. Aleiodes wasps are parasites of forest caterpillars. The female wasps search for a particular kind of caterpillar, and inject an egg into it. Parasitism by the wasp does not immediately kill the caterpillar, but it continues to feed and grow for a time. Eventually, feeding by the wasp larva causes the host caterpillar to shrink and mummify, then the immature wasp makes its cocoon inside the mummified remains of its conquered prey.

When it completes its development, the young wasp cuts an exit hole from the caterpillar mummy and flies away to mate, and continue this cycle of parasitic behavior. “Killing and mummifying caterpillars may sound bad, but these are actually highly beneficial insects.” Shaw says. “These wasps are helping to naturally control the populations of plant-feeding caterpillars, so they help to sustain the biodiversity of tropical forests.”

Shaw tells more about the behavior of parasitic wasps and other insects in his forthcoming book, Planet of the Bugs, due to be published by the University of Chicago Press in September.

The field research was conducted by Shaw at the Yanayacu cloud forest research station of Napo Province, in the eastern Andes slopes of Ecuador. Previous research by Shaw had discovered nine species of mummy-making wasps at the site, and others are known from around the world, but the full extent of these insect’s biodiversity in Ecuador did not become apparent until recently, when Shimbori and Shaw collaborated to name them all. The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, called Caterpillars and Parasitoids of the Eastern Andes.

Original source:

Shimbori, E and Shaw, SR (2014) Twenty-four new species of Aleiodes Wesmael from the eastern Andes of Ecuador with associated biological information (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Rogadinae). Zookeys 405: 1-81. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.405.7402

 

Additional information:

Shaw, SR (2014) Planet of the Bugs, Evolution and the Rise of Insects. University of Chicago Press, 256 pages. ISBN: 9780226163611. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo18507885.html

Swiss scientists have discovered a new species of aculeate wasp, not hidden somewhere in a jungle on a remote continent, but in Central Europe, in a swampy area just a few kilometers from Zurich. The new species named “Polistes helveticus“, or the Swiss paper wasp, was described in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Paradoxically, this species has been long known in Central Europe but was confused for decades with a closely related species native to southern Europe. Only after the latter expanded its range to northern Switzerland, possibly following climate change, was the confusion noticed.

Six years ago, the Swiss entomologist Rainer Neumeyer discovered a population of paper wasps in wetlands close to Zurich. He thought that he had found P. bischoffi, a well-known species in Switzerland. But at the same location he found another species which, although quite similar to the first, was unusual and could not be identified with certainty.

Neumeyer contacted scientists Gaston-Denis Guex from the University of Zurich, Hannes Baur from the Natural History Museum of Bern, and Christophe Praz from the University of Neuchatel. Together, the scientists used genetic and morphometric analyses to confirm the coexistence of two distinct species at the locality close to Zurich: a northern taxon, already well known from Central Europe, and a little known taxon mostly distributed in southern Europe.

After reviewing the information on the type material, the scientists came to the conclusion that the southern species was P. bischoffi, described 80 years ago from Sardinia. The northern species was given the name P. helveticus.

The southern species was not present in northern Switzerland until recently. The confusion was only revealed after P. bischoffi expanded its distribution northwards, possibly following climate change.

Original Source:

Neumeyer R, Baur H, Guex G-D, Praz C (2014) A new species of the paper wasp genus Polistes (Hymenoptera, Vespidae, Polistinae) in Europe revealed by morphometrics and molecular analyses. ZooKeys 400: 67–118. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.400.6611

A team of scientists from the Universidad de La República, Uruguay discovered three native to northern Argentina new species of the engaging spider group of the tarantulas. The study describing the newly found tarantulas was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

The often hairy and very large spiders known as tarantulas are one of the most famous arachnid groups. Despite their ill fame as vicious killers most tarantulas are harmless to humans. Most tarantulas long lifespans, females can live between 15 and 30 years, which makes them a preferred pet for spider lovers around the world.

The subfamily Theraphosinae to which the three new species belong is a large group of tarantulas distributed exclusively in the New World, whose greatest diversity is found in South America. The 3 new additions are native to the northern parts of Argentina, a region which inspired their names.

Melloleitaoina mutquina, for example has its name derived from the specific epithet mutquina, a noun which means place or thing to smell in Quichua language. This poetic name refers to the locality of Mutquín, where this species is distributed and denotes the aroma of the flora of the region that emerges after rain, perfuming the village of aromatic herbs.

Similarly, M. uru was inspired an ancient legend Quichua, from the northern limit of Argentina, about the Inca princess Uru, who because of her whims and bad government was transformed by the gods into a spider and forced to endlessly work weaving. Lastly, the third new species M. yupanqui, was named to honor to the most important Argentine musician of folklore Atahualpa Yupanqui, pseudonym of Héctor Roberto Chavero Aramburu.

Original Source:

Perafán C, Pérez-Miles F (2014) Three new species of Melloleitaoina Gerschman & Schiapelli, 1960 (Araneae, Mygalomorphae, Theraphosidae) from northern Argentina. ZooKeys 404: 117–129. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.404.6243

The Apodanthaceae are small parasitic plants living almost entirely inside other plants. They occur in Africa, Iran, Australia, and the New World. Bellot and Renner propose the first revision of the species relationships in the family based on combined molecular and anatomical data. They show that Apodanthaceae comprise 10 species, which are specialized to parasitize either legumes or species in the willow family.

Few plants are obligate parasites, and fewer still are endo-parasites, meaning they live entirely within their host, emerging only to flower and fruit. Naturally, these plants are rarely collected, and their ecology, evolution, and taxonomy are therefore poorly understood. Perhaps the weirdest of these families is the Apodanthaceae, which Bellot and Renner now deal with in a paper in PhytoKeys.

Based on most material available of this family, they conclude that it has 10 species occurring in Australia, Africa, Iran, California, Central America and South America. Because the environment that matters to Apodanthaceae is the host, not anything outside it, these plants occur from the lowlands to 2500 m altitude and from deserts to Amazonian forest.

Bellot and Renner obtained DNA data to investigate species limits, and they also provide a key to all species, many illustrations, and a distribution map. The work will thus literally help putting Apodanthaceae on the map.

“I am currently assembling the plastid genome of the African species,” says Bellot, “and am already seeing that it is extremely reduced, fitting with the special lifestyle of Apodanthaceae.”

Original source:

Bellot S, Renner SS (2014) The systematics of the worldwide endoparasite family Apodanthaceae (Cucurbitales), with a key, a map, and color photos of most species. PhytoKeys 36: 41. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.36.7385

 

Additional information:

Funding came from the German Research Foundation (DFG RE 603/16-1).

 

Lying forgotten in museum collections two new species of yellow-shouldered bats have been unearthed by scientists at the American Museum of New York and The Field Museum of Natural History and described in the open access journal ZooKeys. These two new additions to the genus Sturnira are part of a recent discovery of three bats hidden away in collections around the world, the third one still waiting to be officially announced.

Up until recently the genus Sturnira was believed to contain only 14 species. In the last years closer morphological and molecular analysis have revealed an unexpected species richness in the genus. Sturnira now includes 22 described species, making it the most speciose genus in the Neotropical bat family Phyllostomidae.

Phyllostomidae, or the New World leaf-nosed bats are exclusively found in the biodiversity rich tropical areas of Central and South America. Both the scientific and common names of these bats refer to their often large, lance-shaped noseleaves. Because these bats use echolocation to orientate in the darkness the “nose-leaf” is thought to serve some role in fine-tuning their call.

All species in the yellow-shouldered genus Sturnira are frugivorous which means they feed largely on fruit. They are endemic to the Neotropics where they inhabit tropical lowland and montane forests. In fact the greatest diversity in the genus occurs on the elevated forested slopes of the Andes where at least 11 species occur.

The two newly described species, Sturnira bakeri and Sturnira burtonlimi occur in western Ecuador and in Costa Rica and Panama. The reason why they went unrecognized in collections is a superficial resemblance with other species in the genus, most of which were described without adequate illustrations to communicate identifying characteristics. Only after an in-depth molecular analysis that included over 100 samples from most of the species of the genus could the new species be identified. “Modern electronic publications likeZooKeys permit extensive and detailed color photography to accompany taxonomic descriptions. Any reader can easily and clearly appreciate the character states we use to distinguish these new taxa.” said co-author Bruce Patterson.

Original Source:

Velazco PM, Patterson BD (2014) Two new species of yellow-shouldered bats, genus Sturnira Gray, 1842 (Chiroptera, Phyllostomidae) from Costa Rica, Panama and western Ecuador. ZooKeys 402: 43-66. doi:10.3897/zookeys.402.7228

Two new species of weakly electric fishes from the Congo River basin are described in the open access journal ZooKeys. One of them, known from only a single specimen, is named “Petrocephalus boboto.” “Boboto” is the word for peace in the Lingala language, the lingua franca of the Congo River, reflecting the authors’ hope for peace in troubled Central Africa.

On a 2010 field trip to the Congo River of Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the riverside village of Yangambi-Lokélé, French ichthyologist Sébastien Lavoué of the Taiwan Institute of Oceanography and American ichthyologist John Sullivan of Cornell University, both specialists on mormyrid weakly electric fishes, captured a single individual of the genus Petrocephalus not quite like any they had seen before.

“Sébastien has the best eye of anyone in the world for Petrocephalus,” says Sullivan. “So when he wasn’t certain what species it belonged to, we flagged it as one to look at carefully once we got home.”

As they had for hundreds of other Petrocephalus specimens collected in Central Africa since the late 1990s, they placed the small, silvery fish in a small basin with water from the river and recorded its electric organ discharge (EOD) with an oscilloscope, humanely euthanized it, took its photo, procured a tissue sample for DNA analysis, tagged it and preserved it in formaldehyde.

Petrocephalus are African weakly fishes of the family Mormyridae that produce pulses of only a few hundred millivolts from an organ made of modified muscle cells in front of their tail. Receptor cells on the fishes’ skin detect distortions to the electric field created by nearby objects in the water. In this way, they are able to “electrolocate” through their complex aquatic environment at night. Their short electric pulses, too weak to be sensed by touch, are also used to communicate the sender’s species identity and gender to other electric fishes.

When Sullivan and other researchers collect live electric fishes in the field, they routinely make recordings of these EODs, one fish at a time, so that they can later study and compare the signals and the specimens’ anatomy together. Specimens are individually tagged so that after they are preserved and placed in a museum collection, they remain linked to their EOD recordings. “With these electric fishes it is often difficult to determine where the species boundaries are, and we need all the available evidence, from morphology, DNA and their EODs to figure it out.” Sullivan said. In this case, the EOD of this odd Petrocephalus was not so different from EODs of other species in this genus.

Back in his laboratory in Taipei, Lavoué sequenced the gene cytochrome b from the specimen. Comparing this sequence to those from other Petrocephalus specimens and careful examination of the fish’s morphology and its EOD helped him determine that it belonged to an undescribed species. “Describing a new species from a single specimen is far from ideal,” Lavoué said, “but in this case it seemed the best thing to do. In the places we’ve sampled, it’s obviously very rare. Since we haven’t yet found any locality where it’s common, it’s unlikely we’ll find such a locality anytime soon.”

Lavoué and Sullivan named this species “Petrocephalus boboto“: the word “boboto” means peace and fellowship in the Lingala language spoken along the Congo River.

“We named this hard-to-find Petrocephalus species “boboto” in the hopes that solutions for peace—though elusive like this fish—can be found in eastern D.R. Congo and the other troubled areas of Central Africa,” said Sullivan.

The other new Petrocephalus species Lavoué and Sullivan describe in the paper, also from the Congo River basin, is named for their colleague, Matthew Arnegard, another mormyrid researcher currently working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.

Funding:

The research that led to the discovery of the two new Petrocehpalus species was funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States and a Fulbright scholarship to J. Sullivan.

 

Original Source:

Lavoué S, Sullivan JP (2014) Petrocephalus boboto and Petrocephalus arnegardi, two new species of African electric fish (Osteoglossomorpha, Mormyridae) from the Congo River basin. ZooKeys 400: 43. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.400.6743

 

Contact:

John P. Sullivan,
PhD., Collection Archivist & Curatorial Affiliate,
Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates,
159 Sapsucker Woods Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850.
Email: jpsullivan@cornell.edu
Tel: 607.342.2234