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Nowadays, an increasing number of rivers and lakes are being invaded by exotic snails, which come from remote regions, and even other continents. Such species represent a threat to native species, as they compete for food or space with them.

This is the case of the mudsnail Potamopyrgus antipodarum. This small aquatic snail is native to New Zealand, and has spread throughout rivers, lakes or streams in Europe, Australia, America and Asia. The invasion success of this mudsnail may be partly due to the ability of females to reproduce without participation of males (i.e. parthenogenesis). This means that only one female is able to start a new population. Besides, the reproductive potential is huge, up to 230 juveniles per female in a year.

But how can these snails disperse from catchment to catchment? If the species were able to tolerate desiccation, it could be transported attached to birds, fishing tools or terrestrial animals. This possibility has been investigated by the Spanish ecologists Álvaro Alonso and Pilar Castro-Díez from the University of Alcalá, whose research was published in the open-access journal NeoBiota.

They performed a laboratory experiment, exposing the snails to different dehydration periods and counting the number of surviving snails. In this way they demonstrated that the mudsnail can survive up to 48 hours out of water. From this finding, two (low-cost) and relatively easy control mechanisms for avoiding the spread of mudsnails emerge: 1) exposing to air of any fishing tools and/or boats for more than 53 hours and 2) avoiding the access of wild and domestic animals to infected rivers or lakes via physical barriers or scarecrows. Such simple measures can actually help to preserve water bodies free of invaders.

Original source:
Alonso A, Castro-Díez P (2012) Tolerance to air exposure of the New Zealand mudsnail Potamopyrgus antipodarum (Hydrobiidae, Mollusca) as a prerequisite to survival in overland translocations. NeoBiota 14: 67-74. doi: 10.3897/neobiota.14.3140

Rare forget-me-nots discovered in the mountains of New Zealand

Two rare species of forget-me-nots have been added to Flora of New Zealand. These new species were discovered in the mountains of the South Island during an expedition led by Dr. Carlos A. Lehnebach. These new species have been described and illustrated in an article published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

The expedition was part of a major endeavour by a group of botanists at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in partnership with Landcare Research aiming to describe and list all forget-me-nots (Myosotis) found in New Zealand. Dr. Lehnebach, who is a curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand, describes the mountains of the South Island of New Zealand as a hotspot for forget-me-nots diversity as over 30 species are found there.

"The diversity of forms, flower color and leaf shape of New Zealand forget-me-nots is really amazing" said Dr. Lehnebach. "New Zealand forget-me-nots are far different from their blue flower relatives commonly found in people’s gardens, and some native species have yellow, pink, or tube-like brown-bronze flowers. New Zealand is also home for the smallest forget-me-not in the world!" he added.

These two new species are extremely uncommon. One is currently known from a single spot where only six plants were found. The other species is habitat-specific and it is only found at the base of limestone bluffs. "Because of the low number of plants and populations currently known for these forget-me-nots, they have been rated as Nationally Critical", said Dr. Lehnebach. This is not unusual for New Zealand forget-me-nots, and many of them are currently threatened.

Original source:
Lehnebach CA (2012) Two new species of forget-me-nots (Myosotis, Boraginaceae) from New Zealand. PhytoKeys 16: 53. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.16.3602

The ZooKeys article on a newly discovered spider family from the caves of California and Oregon, has turned into the most visited ZooKeys paper ever, with more than 15,000 visits of the ORIGINAL article within just a day (20,000 in three days!).

The number of visits from all over the media are counted in the hundreds of thousands already, within just two weekend days! Even though the article was monolingual, there are Wikipedia entries in seven languages so far.

The paper was also featured by CNN, The New York Times, Scientific American and on BBC Today, among MANY other media.

The forests of the coastal regions from California to British Columbia are renowned for their unique and ancient animals and plants, such as coast redwoods, tailed frogs, mountain beavers and the legendary Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch). Whereas Bigfoot is probably just fiction, a huge, newly discovered spider is very real. Trogloraptor (or "cave robber") is named for its cave home and spectacular, elongate claws. It is a spider so evolutionarily special that it represents not only a new genus and species, but also a new family (Trogloraptoridae). Even for the species-rich insects and arachnids, to discover a new, previously unknown family is an historic moment. A study of the new family and its evolutionary and conservation significance was published in the open access journal Zookeys.

A team of citizen scientists from the Western Cave Conservancy and arachnologists from the California Academy of Sciences found these spiders living in caves in southwest Oregon. Colleagues from San Diego State University found more in old-growth redwood forests. Charles Griswold, Curator of Arachnology, Joel Ledford, postdoctoral researcher, and Tracy Audisio, graduate student, all at the California Academy of Sciences, collected, analyzed, and described the new family. Audisio’s participation was supported by the Harriet Exline Frizzell Memorial Fund and by the Summer Systematics Institute at the Academy, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Trogloraptor hangs beneath rudimentary webs on cave ceilings. It is about four centimeters wide when its legs are extended—larger than the size of a half-dollar coin. Their extraordinary, raptorial claws suggest that they are fierce, specialized predators, but their prey and attack behavior remain unknown.

The anatomy of Trogloraptor forces arachnologists to revise their understanding of spider evolution. Strong evidence suggests that Trogloraptor is a close relative of goblin spiders, but Trogloraptor possesses a mosaic of ancient, widespread features and evolutionary novelties.

The true distribution of Trogloraptor remains unknown: that such a relatively large, peculiar animal could elude discovery until 2012 suggests that more may be lurking in the forests and caves of western North America.

Original source
Griswold CE, Audisio T, Ledford JM (2012) An extraordinary new family of spiders from caves in the Pacific Northwest (Araneae, Trogloraptoridae, new family). ZooKeys 215: 77-102. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.215.3547

Green lacewings are delicate green insects with large, lace-like wings that live in a wide variety of habitats, especially tropical forests. Adults mostly feed on flowers, but the larvae are ferocious predators of other insects, frequently carrying the dead carcasses of their prey on their backs after killing them using their enormous, sucking tube-like jaws.

In this study, a beautiful new species of green lacewing in the genus Semachrysa is described from the Malaysian rainforest. The wing pattern is its most distinctive feature. Yet, this discovery could have been missed by scientists, as the only documented evidence that the new species existed was an exquisite series of images posted online in Flickr® after the insect was released.

Only after scientists came across the images online by chance, efforts were made to capture more specimens so that this species could be formally described as new to science. Without an actual specimen to place in a museum as a reference, a formal description is not possible. One year later another, individual was collected at the same locality and the scientists and professional photographer joined forces to collaborate on the description of this new species, which was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Original source:
Winterton SL, Guek HP, Brooks SJ (2012) A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy. ZooKeys 214: 1-11 doi: 10.3897/zookeys.214.3220

Photo by Guek Hock Ping, also known as Kurt (orionmystery); http://orionmystery.blogspot.com

Session 1: Discovery: It’s all about the metadata? Or is it?

Vishwas Chavan, GBIF

Towards next generation (data inclusive) publishing

The Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, or OpenAIRE, has conducted an interview with the Managing Director and Founder of Pensoft Publishers, Prof. Lyubomir Penev. The interview soncerns the new type of scholarly paper, designed in collaboration between Pensoft Publishers and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and rapidly gaining popularity: the Data Paper.

Read the full text of the interview here.

In a special issue of ZooKeys, initiated by the Natural History Museum London, Vince Smith and Vladimir Blagoderov bring together 18 papers by 81 authors to look at progress and prospects for mass digitising entire natural history collections.

Centuries of exploration and discovery have documented the diversity of life on Earth. Records of this biodiversity are, for the most part, distributed across varied and distinct natural history collections worldwide. That has made the task of assessing the information in these collections an immense challenge, the largest of which is how to capture specimen data fast enough to achieve digitisation of entire collections while maintaining sufficient data quality.

Now, an effort is underway to digitise major collections to unlock their research potential and provide unlimited access to the public. This series of eighteen articles in the open-access journal ZooKeys examines recent advances in imaging systems and data gathering techniques, combined with more collaborative approaches to digitisation. These provide a snapshot of progress toward the creation of a global virtual natural history museum.

“As a sample of the natural world, these collections underpin our understanding of ecosystems, biodiversity and the sustainable use of natural resources” says Vince Smith, Cybertaxonomist at the Natural History Museum London. “Technical innovations in digitising hardware, software and data interactions are now making it possible to conceive of wholly digital collections, creating a new frontier for natural history research”.

Examples of research covered by these articles include a description to efforts digitise 30 million plant, insect and vertebrate specimens at NCB Naturalis in the Netherlands; new scanning and telemicroscopy solutions to digitise the millions of pinned insect specimens held in the Australian National Insect Collection and its European and North American counterparts; citizen science projects being used to crowdsource the transcription of thousands of specimen labels and field notebooks; and new data portals providing central access to millions of biological specimens across Europe.

Original source:
Blagoderov V, Smith VS (2012) Bringing collections out of the dark. In: Blagoderov V, Smith VS (Ed) No specimen left behind: mass digitization of natural history collections. ZooKeys 209: 1-6. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.209.3699

Additional Information:
InvertNet http://invertnet.dyndns.org/
Notes from Nature http://www.notesfromnature.org/
Heteroptera Species Pages http://research.amnh.org/pbi/heteropteraspeciespage/
Field Notes of Junius Henderson http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Field_Notes_of_Junius_Henderson
OpenUp!  http://open-up.eu/
Morphbank-ALA http://morphbank.ala.org.au/
DScan in action http://youtu.be/zyT7l-CZego
North Carolina State University Insect Museum http://insectmuseum.org/
NCSUIM collection: http://www.gigapan.com/users/ncsuinsectmuseum/gigapans

Plant overcomes infertility to give rise to a new species in Scotland

A new species of monkey flower, created by the union of two foreign plant species, has been discovered on the bank of a stream in Scotland. Genetic changes in this attractive yellow-flowered hybrid have allowed it to overcome infertility and made it a rare example of a brand new species that has originated in the wild in the last 150 years. Thousands of wild species and some crops are thought to have originated in this way, yet only a handful of examples exist where this type of species formation has occurred in recent history.

The ancestors of the new plant were brought from the Americas as botanical curiosities in the 1800s and were quickly adopted by Victorian gardeners. Soon after their arrival, they escaped the confines of British gardens and can now be found growing in the wild, along the banks of rivers and streams. Reproduction between these species produces hybrids that are now widespread in Britain. Yet, genetic differences between the two parents mean that the hybrids are infertile and cannot go beyond the first generation.

Dr Mario Vallejo-Marin, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Stirling, has documented the first examples of hybrid monkey flowers that have overcome these genetic barriers and show fully restored fertility. This fertile hybrid derived from ‘immigrant’ parents represents a new species, native to Scotland. Dr Vallejo-Marin has chosen to name this species Mimulus peregrinus, which translates as ‘the wanderer’. The species is described in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

‘The two American monkey flowers are unable to produce fertile hybrids due to differences in the amount of DNA present in each species, the equivalent of getting a sterile mule from crossing a horse and a donkey’, said Dr. Vallejo-Marin. ‘However, in rare cases, duplication of the entire hybrid DNA, known as polyploidization, can balance the amount of DNA and restore fertility. Our studies suggest that this is what has happened here.’

The discovery will help scientists to understand how new species form. It is thought that many existing plant species including crops such as wheat, cotton and tobacco may have originated in a similar way, but finding examples of this process in action is rare. ‘This is an exciting opportunity to study evolution as it happens,’ said Vallejo Marin. ‘We do not yet know how common the new species is or how well it will fare, so the next step will be to find out its distribution and whether its ecological characteristics, allow it to colonise environments that cannot be currently exploited by its parents.’

Original source:
Vallejo-Marín M (2012) Mimulus peregrinus (Phrymaceae): A new British allopolyploid species. PhytoKeys 14: 1-14. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.14.3305

The northern part of the North Island of New Zealand is marked at approximately 38° S latitude by a distinct ecological boundary known as the "kauri line". This region forms the southern distributional limit of many plants and is the warmest part of New Zealand. A number of endemic plants are found there. Ecologists have recently discovered a new species of wirerush from peatlands north of the "kauri line".

Wetlands serve vital ecological functions by providing wildlife habitat, carbon storage, nutrient regulation and water balance. New Zealand has a number of wetland types. The peat-forming wetlands are dominated by a plant commonly known as wirerush (Empodisma, Restionaceae). The name Empodisma is derived from a Greek word meaning "to hinder". Both the common and the Greek name describe its dense scrambling growth form. Empodisma is in the southern hemisphere family Restionaceae.

The horizontal root systems of wirerush branch profusely forming finely divided rootlets with long-lived root hairs. In wirerush bogs, the underlying peat is formed largely from the remains of the root systems, stems bases and trapped plant litter. The peat mass absorbs water like a sponge. In peat bogs, incoming rainfall and atmospheric particles are the only source of nutrients. These are removed from the flow of water in the porous upper layers of peat. This may be an adaptive feature in nutrient-poor environments such as peat bogs.

Steve Wagstaff and Beverly Clarkson recognize three species of wirerush including the newly described species Empodisma robustum. Empodisma robustum is only found in peatlands in northern New Zealand, whereas E. minus is found in central and southern New Zealand and eastern Australia, and E. gracillimum is restricted to western Australia. Their study provides an account of the origin, diversification and ecology of the genus with descriptive keys and illustrations.

Original source:
Wagstaff SJ, Clarkson BR (2012) Systematics and ecology of the Australasian genus Empodisma (Restionaceae) and description of a new species from peatlands in northern New Zealand. PhytoKeys 13: 39-79. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.13.3259