Netherlands

In a hole in a tunicate there lived a hobbit: New shrimp species named after Bilbo Baggins

Two new species of tiny symbiotic shrimps are described, illustrated and named by biology student at Leiden University Werner de Gier as part of his bachelor’s research project, supervised by Dr. Charles H. J. M. Fransen, shrimp researcher of Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Leiden, the Netherlands).

Inspired by the extremely hairy feet of one of the species, the authors decided that they should honour Middle Earth’s greatest halfling, Bilbo Baggins.

Aptly named Odontonia bagginsi, the new shrimp joins the lines of other species named after Tolkien’s characters such as the cave-dwelling harvestman Iandumoema smeagol, the golden lizard Liolaemus smaug and the two subterranean spiders Ochyrocera laracna and Ochyrocera ungoliant.

The newly described shrimps were collected during the Ternate expedition to the Indonesian islands of Tidore and Ternate, organised by Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2009.

Typically for the Odontonia species, the new shrimps do not reach sizes above a centimetre in length, and were found inside tunicates. It is believed that these symbiotic crustaceans are fully adapted to live inside the cavities of their hosts, which explains their small-sized and smooth bodies.

Unlike most Odontonia species, which live inside solitary tunicates, the new species Odontonia plurellicola was the first one to be associated with a colonial tunicate. These tunicates have even smaller internal cavities, which explains the tiny size of the new species.

To determine the placement of the new species in the tree of life, the scientists compared the shrimps’ anatomical features, including the legs, mouthparts and carapace. As a result, they were assigned to Odontonia. Further, the available genetic information and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images of the unusual feet of the newly discovered shrimp provided a new updated identification key for all members of the species group.

“Being able to describe, draw and even name two new species in my bachelor years was a huge honour. Hopefully, we can show the world that there are many new species just waiting to be discovered, if you simply look close enough!” says Werner de Gier, who is currently writing his graduate thesis at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and working together with Dr. Charles Fransen on crustaceans.

###

Original source:

de Gier W, Fransen CHJM (2018) Odontonia plurellicola sp. n. and Odontonia bagginsi sp. n., two new ascidian-associated shrimp from Ternate and Tidore, Indonesia, with a phylogenetic reconstruction of the genus (Crustacea, Decapoda, Palaemonidae). ZooKeys 765: 123-160. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.765.25277

Claims that declines of pollinator species richness are slowing down in Europe revisited

Having conducted a thorough interpretation of the results of a recent study that inferred decrease in the biodiversity loss among pollinators across Europe, Dr Tom J. M. Van Dooren reveals that this conclusion cannot in fact be drawn. It is only supported for the bee fauna in the Netherlands. His study is published in the open access journal Nature Conservation.

Changes in pollinator abundances and diversity are of major concern. Pollinator diversity is quantified by their species richness: the number of species from a specific taxonomic group of pollinating animals present at a given time in a given area. A recent study, adopted in the recent UN IPBES Pollination Report draft summary, inferred that pollinator species richnesses are decreasing more slowly in recent decades in several taxonomic groups and European countries.

However, Dr Tom J. M. Van Dooren, affiliated with both Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Netherlands, and the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris, France, has now published his own study to show in detail the inaccuracies that the earlier conclusion has been based on.

Among other points, the scientist notes that the earlier study contained no explicit statistical comparisons between species richness changes in different periods. The earlier study also treated richness changes at country level and small spatial resolution as equivalent, while they probably represent different processes.

“Plants in Great Britain at the smallest spatial scales suggest a reduced rate of changes, but the results for larger spatial scales are not significant,” he illustrates. “The same holds for butterflies in the Netherlands.”

Dr Tom J. M. Van Dooren only finds support in the results of the earlier publication for a decelerating decline in bumblebees and other wild bees in the Netherlands. “This is in fact one taxon, the bees Anthophila, in a single country, the Netherlands”, he notes.

“The lack of robustness points again to the possibility that results found in the data can be due to changes in the shapes of species accumulation curves,” Dr Tom J. M. Van Dooren summarises. “Therefore the status of the statement on decelerating declines in the Pollination Report should be adjusted accordingly.”

###

Original source:

Van Dooren TJM (2016) Pollinator species richness: Are the declines slowing down? Nature Conservation 15: 11-22. doi: 10.3897/natureconservation.15.9616

Photo credit:

Aiwok, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

World’s tiniest snail record broken with a myriad of new species from Borneo

The world’s record for the smallest land snail is broken once again. A minute shell with an average diameter of 0.7 mm was found in Malaysian Borneo by a team of Dutch and Malaysian biologists along with another 47 new species of greatly varying sizes. Called ‘dwarf’ (“nanus” meaning “dwarf” in Latin), the new snail, Acmella nana, is first-shown to the world in the open-access journal ZooKeys, where the last record-holder was announced only about a month ago.

The world’s tiniest snail has a shell of merely 0.50 – 0.60 mm width and 0.60 – 0.79 mm height. The previous holder of the title of world’s smallest snail, the Chinese Angustopila dominikae, published earlier this year, measured just 0.80 and 0.89 mm respectively.

Some of the new 48 species described in the present paper are widespread in Borneo and had been familiar to the team of snail researchers for decades. Yet, they had not got round to naming them until now. Others eke out a hidden existence on mountain tops or in rare vegetation types and, therefore, were only recently discovered by the authors. For instance, there are seven new species that can only be found on the 4,095-metre-high Mount Kinabalu. Another example, called Diplommatina tylocheilos, only lives at the entrance of the hardly accessible Loloposon Cave in Mount Trusmadi.

The new information tells us more about isolated, or endemic, species such as the new record-holder. Moving so slowly, snails can easily get stuck in very small patches of a habitat. There they can spend long enough to evolve and adapt to the particular limited area, undisturbed by the rest of the world. This makes them excellent examples of how endemic species can arise.

On the other hand, their restricted distribution makes them key targets for biodiversity conservation. “A blazing forest fire at Loloposon Cave could wipe out the entire population ofDiplommatina tylocheilos,” says co-author Schilthuizen.

The discoveries are the latest result of an ongoing research project on the snail fauna of Borneo by the authors. For more than twenty-five years, Jaap Vermeulen, Thor-Seng Liew, and Menno Schilthuizen of Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Universiti Malaysia Sabah, have been documenting Malaysia’s wonderful terrestrial molluscs. Only last year, also in ZooKeys, the team published ten new Malaysian species of the “micro-jewel” snails of the genus Plectostoma.

###

Original source:

Vermeulen JJ, Liew TS, Schilthuizen M (2015) Additions to the knowledge of the land snails of Sabah (Malaysia, Borneo), including 48 new species. ZooKeys 531: 1-139. doi:10.3897/zookeys.531.6097