Dr Michael Pogue, a Research Entomologist in the ARS Systematic Entomology Laboratory, at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, was sent a series of moth specimens from Bahia, Brazil, for identification. The insects were under consideration as a possible biocontrol agent for the invasive Brazilian peppertree in Florida.

‘The species was initially identified as a common species, but when comparisons were made, it became evident that there were multiple species involved’ said Dr. Pogue. Using characters from the moths’ male and female genitalia, Dr. Pogue determined that the so-called ‘common’ species actually consisted of six new species, plus two described species.

Brazilian peppertree is one of the most damaging invasive species in Florida. Originally introduced as an ornamental plant into Florida at least three times in the mid- to late 1800’s, it has since invaded a number of habitats throughout southern and central Florida. In addition to this new biocontrol species, two other species (one new) native to Florida also feed on Brazilian peppertree. The potential biocontrol species had been described previously, but the remaining five new species were described in the present study in ZooKeys.

‘What was interesting about this identification was the discovery of so many new species’, said Dr Pogue. ‘The wing pattern was similar among these species, but their reproductive systems were quite different’. ‘It became obvious that multiple cryptic species were involved only when these dissections were made.’

Cryptic species complexes can be confusing and require proper careful assessment of morphological or molecular characters in order to allow for identifications.

 

 

Original Source:

Pogue MG (2013) A review of the Paectes arcigera species complex (Guenée) (Lepidoptera, Euteliidae). In: Schmidt BC, Lafontaine JD (Eds) Contributions to the systematics of New World macro-moths IV. ZooKeys 264: 125–163. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.264.3274

Taxonomy – the discipline that defines and names groups of organisms – is a field of science that still employs many of the methods used during the beginnings of the discipline in the 18th century. Despite the increasing use of molecular information to delineate new species, the study of the morphology of specimens remains one of the major tasks of taxonomists. These studies often require first-hand examination of the reference specimens (so-called type material) deposited at museum collections around the globe – a time-consuming and laborious task.

To facilitate this procedure, a group of researchers from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) are exploring the possibilities offered by 3D digital imaging. In a recent article published in the open-access journal ZooKeys, the researchers use X-ray computed tomography to create digital, three-dimensional representations of tiny animals, displaying both internal and external characteristics of the specimens at a detail level similar to that of the microscope.

To demonstrate their method, the researchers imaged a number of polychaete species (marine bristle-worms)—the choice of this group being obvious to Sarah Faulwetter, the leading author, because "despite being ecologically very important, these animals exhibit a fascinating diversity of forms and tissue types, allowing to test the methodology across a range of samples with different characteristics".

The resulting interactive 3D models allow any researcher to virtually rotate, magnify or even dissect the specimen and thus extracting new scientific information, whereas the structure and genetic material of the analysed specimen are kept intact for future studies.
The team stress the importance of 3D imaging methods for taxonomy on its way into the twenty-first century: "Our vision for the future is to provide a digital representation of each museum specimen, simultaneously accessible via the internet by researchers and nature enthusiasts worldwide," says the team leader, Dr Christos Arvanitidis from HCMR.

The instant accessibility of specimens will speed up the creation and dissemination of knowledge. As the authors point out, "human efforts, combined with novel technologies, will help taxonomy to turn into a cyberscience whose discoveries might rival those made during the great naturalist era of the nineteenth century."

See also the playlist in the Pensoft video channel at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrYfgSbGP4qRsKnc-47wkxgz6ww1HMHox

The study was supported by the European Union projects MARBIGEN (FP7-REGPOT-2010-1) and ViBRANT (RI-261532)

Original Source:

Faulwetter S, Vasileiadou A, Kouratoras M, Dailianis T, Arvanitidis C (2013) Micro-computed tomography: Introducing new dimensions to taxonomy. ZooKeys 263: 1-45. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.263.4261

 

Two wasp species, Calymmochilus dispar and Gelis apterus, have been recorded as parasitoids on ant-eating spiders in a study published in the open access journal ZooKeys. The host spider, Zodarion styliferum, belongs to the largest genus of predominantly ant-eating spiders. Their distribution area includes Europe, Asia and North Africa, significantly with at least 35 species reported for the Iberian Peninsula only, marking a record in numbers in Portugal, where this study was conducted.

Available data on the biology of the host spider shows that all species of the genus Zodarion are compulsory ant eaters. What is interesting is that these spiders perform aggressive mimicry, i.e. disguise as ants to help them in their hunt and to capture their prey. These crafty hunters are often nocturnal wanderers and mainly active in twilight.

During the day, these spiders remain hidden in carefully built igloo-shaped stone retreats that are attached to the underside of rocks or dead wood. The igloos provide protection against unfavourable environmental conditions and enemies such as ants.

Despite these evolutionary advancements in the fight for survival, however, the Z. styliferum spider turns out to be an easy victim for wasp species in their strive for reproduction.

The predatory wasp attacks during daylight when the spiders are inactive. The females of the parasitoid species attack the hosts in the shelter of their igloo, penetrating the walls with their long ovipositors. When collected for this study, the wasp larvae were attached to the abdomen of an immobilised spider juvenile, which they used as food for their own development.

Apart from feeding on the juveniles, the peculiar home of the ant-eating host provides another convenience for the parasites. The larva of G. apterus makes a cocoon inside the spider igloo before pupation. The other species (C. dispar), however, does not create a cocoon. Rather, it takes advantage of the already built spider igloo to help protect the bare larvae inside.

Such parasitoid behavior is common among wasp species. The author of the original research article, Dr. Korenko from the Department of Agroecology and Biometeorology of the Czech
University of Life Sciences  explains: “Several groups of Hymenoptera develop on spider hosts feeding on the flesh of the spider or on its eggs. The parasitoids attack a number of spiders ranging from ground dwelling and fast moving hunters like wolf spiders to web spiders such as orb-web weavers that stay on webs during most of their life.”

 

Korenko S, Schmidt S, Schwarz M, Gibson GAP, Pekár S (2013) Hymenopteran parasitoids of the ant-eating spider Zodarion styliferum (Simon) (Araneae, Zodariidae). ZooKeys 262: 1-15. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.262.3857

A success story announced by the International Society of Hymenopterists and Pensoft Publishers

The open access model has created a range of new opportunities for the dissemination and popularization of scientific research, but many society- or institution-based academic journals continue on a subscription basis.

In 2011, the International Society of Hymenopterists (ISH) decided to move their publication, the Journal of Hymenoptera Research (JHR), from a conventional, subscription-based model to open access with Pensoft Journal Systems (PJS 2.0). The two years of positive experience are described in an Editorial in the latest issue of JHR.

One of the many positive changes that JHR has been experiencing since the switch is a flexible schedule allowing an unlimited number of published articles per year, as opposed to the earlier restriction of two issues per year. "The open access model and online publication of Pensoft offers a wide range of additional dissemination services", says Dr Stefan Schmidt from the Zoologische Staatssammlung in Munich, Germany.

These services include data publishing and automated export of "atomized" content, that is, separate parts of the articles – like species descriptions and images – to important scientific databases and global aggregators." Amongst these platforms are the Encyclopedia of Life, the wiki Species-ID, and the Plazi Treatment Repository.

Open access facilitates public outreach of research through press releases associated with published articles. Since May 2011, Pensoft has been supporting authors in "translating" the technical texts into press releases with accessible language and illustrative media, which then result in postings on science news distributors, mass and scientific media and through the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.). The service means a wider outreach and popularity for the research performed by the authors as well as for hymenoptera research more broadly.

"The results are more than obvious – the journal started a new life, experienced a visible growth and became a place to go for Society members and specialists with an interest in Hymenoptera", Schmidt says, adding that "while we put a lot of effort into technological development, we continue to produce a high resolution full-colour printed version with a subscription option for individuals and institutions, and offer a discount on printed copies and open access fees for Society members."

"The Journal of Hymenoptera Research was the first society journal that trusted the novel journal publishing platform of Pensoft. I am convinced that using the previous print-based, and PDF-only publishing model (even in open access) brings a lot of trouble to institutional and society journals. Many of them simply struggle to survive. We are glad to witness such a successful transition of JHR", concludes Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and managing director of Pensoft Publishers.

 

 

Original source:

Schmidt S, Broad GR, Stoev P, Penev L (2013) The move to open access and growth: experience from Journal of Hymenoptera Research. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 30: 10.3897/JHR.30.4733 doi: 10.3897/JHR.30.4733.

Additional information:

International Hymenopterists Society (ISH): The Society aims to encourage scientific research and promote the diffusion of knowledge about sawflies, bees, ants, and other wasps. Membership is open to all persons with an interest in Hymenoptera and members are entitled to receive discounts on open access fees and for printed copies of the journal.

Pensoft Journal System (PJS 2.0) is a novel editorial management system launched by Pensoft Publishers in early 2013. PJS 2.0 completes for the first time ever the cycle from article authoring, through submission, community peer-review and editing, to publication and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform. PJS 2.0 has its own online, collaborative, article-authoring tool (Pensoft Writing Tool, PWT) that provides a large set of pre-defined, but flexible, templates of different types of article. In the PWT environment, the authors can work collaboratively on their manuscripts online and may also invite external contributors, such as mentors, potential reviewers, linguistic and copy editors, colleagues, etc., who may watch and comment on the text during the manuscript preparation. PJS 2.0 also optionally allows open, public and community peer-review processes.

ImpactStory is an open-source, web-based service that is designed to make it quick and easy to uncover the impact of  research output. Being philanthropically-funded and not-for-profit, this project builds on the belief that open altmetrics are key for building the coming era of Web-native science. ImpactStory is committed to working towards open access, free and open data and radical transparency for the future of science.

ImpactStory goes beyond traditional measurements of research output to embrace broader evidence of use, such as social networks, blogs, reference and citation managers, Wikipedia, and more. The tool helps scholars to explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products—not just journal articles, but also blog posts, datasets, and software. ImpactStory’s combination of traditional and innovative approaches aims to bring additional use to the rich Web environment.

The project began its life at the Beyond Impact workshop in 2011, after which a few passionate participants migrated into a hotel hallway to continue working, eventually completing a 24-hour coding marathon to finish a prototype. ImpactStory is now funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation , and is in the process of incorporating as a non-profit corporation.

The people behind this innovative approach are Heather Piwowar, a leading researcher in the area of research data availability and data reuse, and Jason Priem, who contributed to and created several open-source software projects and who coined the term “altmetrics”.

“People bookmark and download research articles for a reason,” says Jason. “Articles that provoke interesting discussions amongst fellow scientists may or may not get cited a lot, but they are still providing important feedback and quality indicators. Additionally, activity in venues like Wikipedia, Twitter, and Delicious provides evidence of broader impacts–evidence that is increasingly important to research funders and administrators.”

“We are glad to be the first to use ImpactStory services and to work together on bringing them to an industry standard. Our authors are happy to see these meaningful icons appearing automatically alongside their articles and summarising, for example, the number of tweets, or Wikipedia articles, in which their work has been mentioned or cited.  A tool that certainly has a great future!” says Pror, Lyubomir Penev, founder and managing director of Pensoft Publishers.

 

 

For more information about the services and the vision of ImpactStory please visit http://impactstory.org or follow us at @impactstory.

Additional information:

ImpactStory is an open-source, web-based tool that helps researchers explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products–traditional ones like journal articles, but also alternative products like blog posts, datasets, and software. Authors, publishers, and institutions can create, explore and share web-based collections, or embed rich impact data right in their webpages with an easy-to-use widget. By helping researchers tell data-driven stories about their impacts, ImpactStory aims to help build a reward system that values and encourages new forms of web-native scholarship. ImpactStory is funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Pensoft Publishers specialize in academic book and open access journal publishing, mostly in the field of biodiversity science and natural history. In early 2103, we launch the Pensoft lJournal System (PJS 2.0), a novel editorial management system that for the first time in scholarly publishing completes the cycle from article authoring through submission, community peer-review and editing, to publication and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform. PJS 2.0 has its own online, collaborative, article-authoring tool (Pensoft Writing Tool, PWT) that provides a large set of pre-defined, but flexible, templates of different types of article.

Pensoft Publishers, publisher of books and open access journals in biodiversity and natural history, have now integrated their editorial management platform with the OpenAIRE platform. The integration will ensure that articles funded by the European Union’s Framework Program Seven (FP7) can automatically be harvested by OpenAIRE to make them even more visible and accessible to academia, industry and the general public.

For a piece of information to be of any use, one must first be able to find it. In the past, information was scarce. Nowadays, there is often just too much of it. We are helped by thousands of computers who read the web day and night, assisting us to find, digest and comprehend it. In this “ocean” of information, open access stands out as being the solution for a barrier-free accessibility of content that can be harvested, extracted, sorted out and indexed by machines.

In collaboration with OpenAIRE, Pensoft Publishers have integrated their editorial management platform (Pensoft Journal System) with the OpenAIRE harvesting mechanism. The integration will ensure that articles funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) can automatically be tracked by OpenAIRE to make them even more visible and accessible. Funding agencies and institutions can now easily find and access publications resulting from projects supported by public funds.

“It is of utmost importance to offer publications and data in ways that are machine-readable as well as human-usable. Otherwise, it just adds to the noise. The highly structured texts Pensoft publishes facilitate reading, text-mining and re-use of data. We are pleased to welcome Pensoft’s open access journals to the OpenAIRE collection,” says Prof Dr Norbert Lossau, coordinator of the OpenAIRE project.

“Pensoft supports barrier-free access to science,” says Prof Lyubomir Penev, Managing Director of Pensoft. “As a publisher of several innovative open-access journals, we know firsthand that openness and standardization are the way forward. We are more than glad to cooperate with OpenAIRE in providing scientists and funding agencies with an integrated platform for  better visibility of  their research and sponsoring efforts. We look forward to future collaboration, such as making publications from other funding schemes easily accessible and thus more visible,” Prof Penev concludes.
_____________________________________

About Pensoft:

Pensoft Publishers specialize in academic and professional book and open access journal publishing, mostly in the field of biodiversity science and natural history. Pensoft are involved as specialists in dissemination, communication, web design, and publishing in several European Union FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects. Pensoft is also active in the field of data publishing and launched a model for “data papers” in a cooperation with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Pensoft and OpenAIRE look forward to future collaboration in the arena of linking publications to data.

________________________________________

About OpenAIRE:

OpenAIRE encourages publishers to support authors in open access publishing and dissemination, alert them about the availability of publication funds, allow immediate deposition in open access repositories and – last but not least – to register their journals at the OpenAIRE website. This suitably places publishers within research infrastructures which in turn allowing the seamless integration of European and world-wide research.

OpenAIRE is interested in hearing from any other publishers interested in exposing their content via another information infrastructure.

________________________________________

More Information:

Pensoft: http://www.pensoft.net

For more details, see a previous OpenAIRE interview at OpenAIRE with Lyubomir Penev of Pensoft: http://www.openaire.eu/en/component/content/article/76-highlights/399-data-paper-the-data-publishing-project-of-pensoft

Copernicus, another open access publisher visible via OpenAIRE: http://www.openaire.eu/en/component/content/article/76-highlights/397

Contact:

Birgit Schmidt, Scientific Manager OpenAIRE, bschmidt@sub.uni-goettingen.de

Najla Rettberg, Scientific Manager OpenAIREplus, najla.rettberg@sub.uni-goettingen.de

 

The western long-beaked echidna, one of the world’s five egg-laying species of mammal, became extinct in Australia thousands of years ago…or did it? Smithsonian scientists and colleagues have found evidence suggesting that not only did these animals survive in Australia far longer than previously thought, but that they may very well still exist in parts of the country today. The team’s findings are published in the Dec. 28, 2012 issue of the journal ZooKeys.

With a small and declining population confined to the Indonesian portion of the island of New Guinea, the western long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus bruijnii) is listed as "Critically Endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. It is also considered extinct in Australia, where fossil remains from the Pleistocene epoch demonstrate that it did occur there tens of thousands of years ago. Ancient Aboriginal rock art also supports the species’ former presence in Australia. However, no modern record from Australia was known to exist until scientists took a closer look at one particular specimen stored in cabinets in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London. Previously overlooked, the specimen’s information showed that it was collected from the wild in northwestern Australia in 1901―thousands of years after they were thought to have gone extinct there.

"Sometimes while working in museums, I find specimens that turn out to be previously undocumented species," said Kristofer Helgen of the Smithsonian Institution, the lead author and the scientist to first report the significance of the echidna specimen. "But in many ways, finding a specimen like this, of such an iconic animal, with such clear documentation from such an unexpected place, is even more exciting."

Long-beaked echidnas are known as monotremes―a small and primitive order of mammals that lay eggs rather than give birth to live young. The platypus, the short-beaked echidna, and the three species of long-beaked echidna (Western, Eastern and Sir David Attenborough’s) are the only monotremes that still exist. The platypus is found only in eastern Australia, the short-beaked echidna is found in Australia and New Guinea, and the long-beaked echidnas were previously known as living animals only from the island of New Guinea. Long-beaked echidnas, which grow to twice the size of the platypus or the short-beaked echidna, are beach-ball sized mammals covered in coarse blackish-brown hair and spines. They use their long, tubular snout to root for invertebrates in the forests and meadows of New Guinea. Among many peculiar attributes, reproduction is one of the most unique―females lay a single leathery egg directly into their pouch where it hatches in about 10 days.

The re-examined specimen in London reveals that the species was reproducing in Australia at least until the early 20th century. It was collected in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia by naturalist John T. Tunney in 1901, on a collecting expedition for the private museum of Lord L. Walter Rothschild in England. Despite collecting many species of butterflies, birds and mammals (some new to science at the time), no full report on his specimens has ever been published. The collection, including the long-beaked echidna specimen, was then transferred to the Natural History Museum in London in 1939 after Rothschild’s death. It was another 70 years before Helgen visited the museum in London and came across the specimen with the original Tunney labels, which both challenged previous thinking about the species’ recent distribution and offered insight into where it may still occur.

"The discovery of the western long-beaked echidna in Australia is astonishing," said Professor Tim Flannery of Macquarie University in Sydney, referring to the new study. "It highlights the importance of museum collections, and how much there is still to learn about Australia’s fauna."

Learning whether the western long-beaked echidna still exists in Australia today will take time. "The next step will be an expedition to search for this animal," Helgen said. "We’ll need to look carefully in the right habitats to determine where it held on, and for how long, and if any are still out there." To find it, Helgen hopes to draw on his experience with the species in New Guinea and to interview those who know the northern Australian bush best. "We believe there may be memories of this animal among Aboriginal communities, and we’d like to learn as much about that as we can," he said.

With the species in danger of extinction, finding Australian survivors or understanding why and when they vanished is an important scientific goal. "We hold out hope that somewhere in Australia, long-beaked echidnas still lay their eggs," said Helgen.

Original source
Helgen KM, Miguez RP, Kohen JL, Helgen LE (2012) Twentieth century occurrence of the Long-Beaked Echidna Zaglossus bruijnii in the Kimberley region of Australia. ZooKeys 255: 103–132. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.255.3774

Two new species of cichlid fish from Lake Victoria are described by biologists from Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Research Department Marine Zoology) and the Institute of Biology Leiden (Section Integrative Zoology), the Netherlands. One of these species is named in honour of Tijs Goldschmidt, author of Darwin’s Dreampond. This book, published in nine languages, describes the dramatic extinction of hundreds of cichlid species in Lake Victoria in the 1980s due to the introduced Nile perch and other human induced environmental changes.

In 1985, Leiden biologists made a survey in the Tanzanian part of the lake, with an old ferry as floating lab, to establish the status of the rapidly declining cichlids. During this expedition Tijs studied the egg spots on the anal fin of cichlids for their possible role in the rapid speciation of these fish. In the Emin Pasha Gulf, among a species nicknamed Haplochromis "argens", individuals were found with aberrant egg dummies and lacking red in the fins. Just the kind of example Tijs was looking for to test his theory of speciation by sexual selection. The aberrant individuals were provisionally named H. "dusky argens".

Both "species" play a part in Tijs’ PhD thesis and in other studies. However, a taxonomic description was never made and whether H. "dusky argens" was a separate species or a colour morph remained unclear. In 1987, most cichlid species from the offshore waters of the lake had disappeared, and with them the urge of taxonomic descriptions.

Now, 25 years later, about a quarter of the cichlid species have recovered in the "Nile perch desert", some of them became even more abundant than in the past, but the former common H. "argens" is still extremely rare. The status of H. "dusky-argens" is unknown as it was only caught in the remote Emin Pasha Gulf, which is not sampled nowadays. Research on successfully resurgent species shows that they were able to adapt morphologically to the new environmental conditions. Their body shape, for instance, changed, so that burst swimming to escape predators improved. Preliminary results suggest that such a response is not found in H. "argens".

The above observations triggered the present taxonomic study as a baseline for further research. It shows that several taxonomic characters differ more between the co-occurring populations of H. "argens" and H. "dusky argens" in the Emin Pasha Gulf, than between populations from different locations. This suggests that they are indeed two species, which are morphologically driven apart at places where they co-occur. In case of H. "argens" the nickname was upgraded to the formal name, while H. "dusky-argens" is now named H. goldschmidti.

Original source
de Zeeuw MP, Westbroek I, van Oijen MJP, Witte F (2013) Two new species of zooplanktivorous haplochromine cichlids from Lake Victoria, Tanzania. ZooKeys 256: 1–34. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.256.3871

Additional Information
Goldschmidt T, de Visser J (1990) On the possible role of egg mimics in speciation. Acta Biotheoretica 38: 125-134.

van Rijssel JC, Witte F (2012) Adaptive responses in resurgent Lake Victoria cichlid over the past 30 years. Evolutionary Ecology. doi: 10.1007/s10682-012-9596-9

South West China, Myanmar and Northern Vietnam contain one of the oldest exposed outcrops of limestone in the world. Within this area are thousands of caves and gorges. It is only recently that botanists have sought to explore the caves for plants. This exploration is yielding many new species new to science, that are known only from these habitats. The current study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

Kew botanist and nettle expert Alex Monro says, "When my Chinese colleague Wei Yi-Gang from the Guangxi Institute of Botany first mentioned cave-dwelling plants to me, I thought that he was mis-translating a Chinese word into English. When we stepped into our first cave, Yangzi cave, I was spell-bound. It had an eerie moonscape look to it and all I could see were clumps of plants in the nettle family growing in very dark condition".

The plants do not grow in complete darkness but do grow in extremely low light levels, deep within the entrance caverns of the caves (sometimes, in as little as 0.04% full sunlight). The British and Chinese authors have been collecting plants from the Nettle family in this limestone landscape for several years and have just published a paper describing three new species, one from a cave and another two from deep gorges.

The cave-dwelling nettle species in question, was found growing in two caves in the Guangxi province of China. Of the species discovered in gorges, one is known from an unusual and striking rock mineral formation called petaloid travertine. Petaloid travertine is a form of limestone deposited by mineral springs that over time forms large petals of rock, in this case clinging to the vertical walls of a gorge.

These plants are members of a genus of Nettles known as Pilea, that is believed to have over 700 species Worldwide, up to one third of which may remain undescribed.

Original source
Monro AK, Wei YG, Chen CJ (2012) Three new species of Pilea (Urticaceae) from limestone karst in China. PhytoKeys 19: 51–66. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.19.3968

A researcher at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History and Department of Biological Sciences has reported the discovery 33 new trapdoor spider species from the American Southwest. These newly described species all belong to the genus Aptostichus that now contains 40 species, two of which are already famous – Aptostichus stephencolberti and Aptostichus angelinajolieae.

The genus now includes other such notable species as Aptostichus barackobamai, named for Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, and reputed fan of Spiderman comics; Aptostichus edwardabbeyi, named for environmentalist and author Edward Abbey (1927-1989); Aptostichus bonoi from Joshua Tree National Park, named for the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2; Aptostichus pennjillettei named for illusionist and intellectual Penn Jillette; Aptostichus chavezi, named for Mexican American and civil rights and labor activist César Chávez (1927-1993).

Other notable new species names include Aptostichus anzaborrego, known only from the Anza Borrego Desert State Park in southern California; and Aptostichus sarlacc from the Mojave Desert, named for George Lucas’ Star Wars creature, the Sarlacc from the fictional desert planet Tatooine.

The researcher, Prof. Jason Bond, who is a trapdoor spider expert and the director of the Auburn University Museum of Natural History was excited at the prospect of such a remarkable and large find of new species here in the United States and particularly California.

"California is known as what is characterized as a biodiversity hotspot. Although this designation is primarily based on plant diversity, the region is clearly very rich in its animal diversity as well. While it is absolutely remarkable that a large number of species from such a heavily populated area have gone unnoticed, it clearly speaks volumes to how little we know of the biodiversity around us and that many more species on the planet await discovery " Bond said.

Like other trapdoor spider species, individuals are rarely seen because they live their lives in below-ground burrows that are covered by trapdoors, made by the spider using mixtures of soil, sand, and/or plant material, and silk. The trapdoor serves to hide the spider when it forages for meals at the burrow entrance, usually at night.

Aptostichus species are found in an amazing number of Californian habitats to include coastal sand dunes, chaparral, desert, oak woodland forests, and at high altitudes in the alpine habitats of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Bond said, "this particular group of trapdoor spiders are among some of the most beautiful with which I have worked; species often have gorgeous tiger-striping on their abdomens. Aptostichus to my mind represents a true adaptive radiation – a classical situation in evolutionary biology where diversification, or speciation, has occurred such that a large number of species occupy a wide range of different habitats".

Bond also noted that while a number of the species have rather fanciful names, his favorite is the one named for his daughter Elisabeth. "Elisabeth’s spider is from an incredibly extreme desert environment out near Barstow, California that is the site of a relatively young volcanic cinder cone. The spiders make their burrows among the lava tubes that extend out from the cone – it is a spectacular place to visit but the species is very difficult to collect because the spiders build rather deep burrow among the rocks".

Original source
Bond JE (2012) Phylogenetic treatment and taxonomic revision of the trapdoor spider genus Aptostichus Simon (Araneae, Mygalomorphae, Euctenizidae). ZooKeys 252: 1. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.252.3588

Additional information
Bond JE and AK Stockman. 2008. An Integrative Method for Delimiting Cohesion Species: Finding the Population-Species Interface in a Group of Californian Trapdoor Spiders with Extreme Genetic Divergence and Geographic Structuring. Systematic Biology, 57: 628-646, doi: 10.1080/10635150802302443