Tag: Pacific

Biodiversity Boost: 24 new deep-sea species discovered in major Pacific research

Researchers have announced the discovery of 24 new deep-sea amphipod species – including one new superfamily – from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), in the central Pacific Ocean.

The discoveries have been published as part of a new open-access ZooKeys special issue, mark a significant advance in identifying the biodiversity of the CCZ – an area which spans six million square kilometres between Hawai’i and Mexico.

Led by Dr Anna Jażdżewska, University of Lodz (UL), and Tammy Horton, National Oceanography Centre (NOC), 16 experts and early-career scientists came together for a week-long taxonomy workshop dedicated to describing new amphipod species from the CCZ, which was organised at the Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Hydrobiology, Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, UL in 2024.

Their findings form part of the International Seabed Authority’s Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative (SSKI) and its ‘One Thousand Reasons’ project, which aims to describe 1,000 new species by the end of the decade.

The research revealed a number of firsts for science, with 24 newly described species spanning 10 amphipod families, including predators and scavengers.

Map of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), Central Pacific Ocean. A. Contract areas from which samples were collected; B. Detail of the central BGR exploration contract area; C. Detail of the eastern CCZ contract areas and APEI-6. (Image credit: Horton et al.).

Notable discoveries include:

A new family (Mirabestiidae) and superfamily (Mirabestioidea), revealing completely new evolutionary branches.
Two new genera (Mirabestia and Pseudolepechinella).
Deepest-known records for multiple genera.
First molecular barcodes for rare species.

“To find a new superfamily is incredibly exciting, and very rarely happens so this is a discovery we will all remember.

With more than 90% of species in the CCZ still unnamed, each species described is a vital step towards improving our understanding of this fascinating ecosystem.

Describing the species encountered during these studies is a critical step in documenting the rich biodiversity of the CCZ, enabling us to communicate effectively about the fauna.”
Dr Tammy Horton

*Syrrhoe manowitzae* sp. nov. (Image credit: Hughes et al.).

A Global Collaboration

Taxonomy is vital to understanding the fauna of the CCZ, providing fundamental knowledge of species, their distributions, and how each species contributes to the fragile ecosystem.

Eight of the species were identified and described by researchers from NOC, who joined colleagues from around the globe including institutions, such as University of Lodz, Natural History Museum, London, Canadian Museum of Nature, Earth Sciences New Zealand (NIWA), University of Hamburg, Senckenberg – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN) and University Museum of Bergen.

The collaborative project also demonstrated the effectiveness of running coordinated and focused taxonomic workshops, providing a model way of working for the future.

Participants of the taxonomic workshop at University of Lodz in 2024. (Image credit: Anna Jażdżewska).

“This was a truly collaborative process that allowed us to achieve the ambitious goal of describing more than 20 species new to science within a year – something that would not have been possible if each of us worked independently.

The team’s findings provide information that is crucial for future conservation and policy decisions, and it highlights how important it is for this work to continue.”
Anna Jażdżewska, University of Lodz

Through initiatives such as these describing around 25 species per year, the amphipods in the eastern CCZ could be almost completely known within 10 years.

What’s in a name?

New species must each be named, and that honour falls to the research team who often draw inspiration from those around them.

Many of the 24 new species have been given meaningful names by those who have spent time learning about them and describing them.

Co-leads Dr Tammy Horton and Anna Jażdżewska both saw species named for them, Byblis hortonae, Thrombasia ania and Byblisoides jazdzewskae (respectively).

Byblis hortonae sp. nov. (Image credit: Peart et al.).
A. CLSM photograph of Thrombasia ania sp. nov. B microscope photograph of Thrombasia ania sp. nov. (Image credit: Anna Jażdżewska).
Byblisoides jazdzewskae sp. nov. (Image credit: Peart et al.).

Dr Horton named one of the species in the new superfamily (Mirabestia maisie) after her daughter, who has waited several years to join her siblings in having that unusual honour.

A. *Mirabestia maisie* sp. nov. immature; B. *Mirabestia maisie* sp. nov. mature female. (Image credit: Horton et al.).

There was an opportunity to pay tribute to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), with Eperopeus vermiculatus being given the name in recognition of WoRMS which researchers described as providing a ‘wonderful resource for all marine taxonomists’.

*Eperopeus vermiculatus* sp. nov., habitus of the female holotype. Photograph of preserved specimen. (Image credit: Tammy Horton).

Involving early‑career scientists (including students) also allowed them to leave their mark in the species names, by commemorating their relatives and by creating intriguing links between the deep sea and the virtual world. According to the author, one species, Lepidepecreum myla, resembles Myla (a character from a video game), as both ‘are just little arthropods trying to survive in total darkness.’

*Lepidepecreum myla* sp. nov. A. Photograph of unstained individual before
manipulation; B. CLSM photography; C. Dorsal view of the animal. (Image credit: Horton et al.).

The team also drew inspiration from linguistics for one species, with Pseudolepechinella apricity representing the spirit of warmth of friendship that came from the week-long workshop.

“Apricity means the feeling of the warmth of the winter sun, and it is one of my favourite words. It was very apt to use during the workshop as we discussed our findings in the warmth of the February sun amid the snow of the Polish winter in Lodz. It was certainly fitting to also use it for one of our amphipod discoveries.

We came together as research colleagues, but the spirit of collaboration and shared experience shone through, so it was important to recognise that in our work.”
Dr Tammy Horton

*Pseudolepechinella apricity* sp. nov. (Image credit: Horton et al.).

ENDS

About the National Oceanography Centre (NOC)

The UK’s National Oceanography Centre (NOC) is one of the world’s top ocean research institutions. NOC’s scientists work around the globe, uncovering links between the ocean, climate change and biodiversity loss, to help every living thing on our planet flourish.

NOC solves challenging multidisciplinary, large scale, long-term marine science problems to underpin international and UK public policy, business and societal outcomes.

NOC is a company limited by guarantee set up under the law of England and Wales (11444362) and registered as a charity (1185265).

NOC operates the Royal Research Ships James Cook and Discovery and develops technology for coastal and deep ocean research.

Working with its partners NOC provides long-term marine science capability including: sustained ocean observations, mapping and surveying; data management; modelling and scientific research and advice.

Among the resources that the NOC provides on behalf of the UK are the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC), the Marine Autonomous and Robotic Systems (MARS) facility, the National Marine Equipment Pool (NMEP), the National Tide and Sea Level Facility (NTSLF), the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) and British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility (BOSCORF).

About the University of Lodz (UL), Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection and Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Hydrobiology

The University of Lodz is a vibrant academic community whose history began on 24 May 1945. Although we are one of the youngest universities in Poland, today we rank among the country’s largest public institutions of higher education.

More than 20,000 students learn across our 12 faculties, supported by an engaged academic community of teachers, researchers, and professional staff. Together, we create an environment shaped not only by knowledge, but by everyday collaboration and shared responsibility.

Scientific research at the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection (FB&EP) has been conducted since the establishment of the University of Lodz. The Faculty is one of the largest biological faculties in Poland that carries out research within the area of all disciplines of biological sciences at the European level. Research projects carried out at the FB&EP encompass basic, applied, as well as methodological studies.

The Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Hydrobiology is one of the oldest units established at the founding of the University of Lodz. As a dynamic and international group of researchers at various career stages, the Department conducts studies on biodiversity, taxonomy, and the ecology of diverse invertebrate groups (including marine fauna), using a wide range of methods—from traditional microscopy to advanced molecular analyses.

About Pensoft Publishers

Pensoft is an independent, open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider, best known for its 30+ biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, One Ecosystem, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. Ever since becoming the first to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a scientific article in the field of biodiversity in 2010, Pensoft has been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.

The special issue can be found through the following link: New deep-sea Amphipoda from Clarion-Clipperton Zone

For more articles on zoology, visit the ZooKeys website and follow the journal on BlueSky and Facebook.

Unusual new zoantharian species is the first described solitary species in over 100 years

A very unusual new species of zoantharian surprised Drs Takuma Fujii and James Davis Reimer, affiliated with Kagoshima University and University of the Ryukyus.

The scientists stumbled upon a solitary individual polyp while conducting SCUBA surveys around the southern Japanese island of Okinawa. They noticed that the creatures were buried almost completely in the soft sediment of the seafloor. It was only their oral disks and tentacles that were protruding above the surface.

Generally, most known zoantharians are colonial (hence their common name of ‘colonial anemones’), and many dwell in shallow waters of subtropical and tropical regions, where their large colonies can be found on coral reefs.

However, these newly discovered polyps were not only leading solitary lives. They were also found to lack zooxanthellae, single-celled organisms that coexist in symbiosis with certain marine invertebrates, also typical for the majority of zoantharians.

The discovery of this unusual new species is reported in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Solitary zoantharian species, such as this one, are known from scant few reports, and only three species are described, all reported more than 100 years ago from the Indo-Pacific region. Overall, very little is known about the hereby studied genus Sphenopus.

The new species, named Sphenopus exilis, is much smaller than the other three Sphenopus species, with its polyps measuring approximately 3 cm in length. It is currently only known from two bays on the east coast of Okinawa Island.

Both of the bays where Sphenopus exilis is found are threatened by development, with one of the bays currently the center of controversy over a proposed American military base expansion and landfill.

“This report demonstrates how much more research is needed on these understudied ecosystems”, stated lead author Dr. Takuma Fujii.

“The only reason this species was discovered was that the right person was in the right place at the right time”, added co-author Dr. James Reimer.

“Such research also shows how important it is to have specialist researchers participate in surveys — otherwise, we might be missing a lot of the biodiversity present in the marine realm simply because we don’t know what we are looking at,” he concluded.

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Original source:

Fujii T, Reimer JD (2016) A new solitary free-living species of the genus Sphenopus (Cnidaria, Anthozoa, Zoantharia, Sphenopidae) from Okinawa-jima Island, Japan. ZooKeys 606: 11-24. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.606.9310

The Castaway: New monitor lizard fills top-order predator role on remote Pacific island

Separated by several hundred kilometres from its next of kin, a new species of blue-tailed monitor lizard unique to the remote Mussau Island has been described. Unknown to science until recently and formally termed the “isolated”, it is the only large-sized land-living predator and scavenger native to the island.

Dubbed a “biogeographical oddity” by its discoverers, led by Valter Weijola, a graduate student from the University of Turku, Finland, the lizard species is also the first new monitor lizard to be described from the country of Papua New Guinea in over twenty years. The finding was published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

Monitors play an important ecological role in many island ecosystems in the southwest Pacific. Predatory mammals have never colonized the region due to the isolation of these islands. Instead, these large, active and intelligent lizards fill the role of top-predators and scavengers. The Pacific monitor lineage to which the new species belongs have been so successful at oversea dispersal that a number of different species now occupy almost every island from the Moluccas in Indonesia to the eastern Solomon Islands and even Micronesia.

The new endemic species was observed and studied during fieldwork by Weijola and local assistants in the relatively dry coastal vegetation of Mussau, but it is likely that it also persist in the remnants of intact forest in the interior of the island.

The formally described female lizard, or holotype, measures 1 m with the tail being one and and a half times the length of the dominantly black-coloured body covered with yellow and orange markings. The tail of the adults shows varying degrees of turquoise to bluish pigmentation. Another distinctive feature for the species is the pale yellow tongue, which is a trait shared only by three other species of Pacific monitors. The new species is known to eat crabs, other reptiles and their eggs, and small birds.

“Usually monitors like these will eat just about anything they can catch and kill, as well as carcass and turtle eggs when available,” explains Weijola. “While young, Pacific monitor lizards are highly secretive and subsist mainly on insects and other small animals.”

The new species, which can grow to well over a meter in length, was named Varanus semotus, a Latin reference to the remoteness and isolation of the relatively small and partly volcanic island where the lizard was found. Close examination revealed the reptile to be distinct from its relatives from New Guinea and New Britain. Genetic studies, conducted by co-authors Stephen Donnellan, South-Australian Museum, and Christer Lindqvist, Åbo Akademi University, showed that the species has been isolated for a long time, estimatedly 1-2 million years, or even longer.

“Isolation is the keyword here,” says Weijola. “It is what has driven speciation and made the South-Pacific region one of the World’s biodiversity hotspots.” For anything to arrive on Mussau (from New Guinea or New Britain) it would need to cross 250-350 kilometers of open sea, and this doesn’t happen frequently. So, once the ancestor arrived, perhaps in the form of a gravid female, the population must have been completely isolated.””These islands are full of unique creatures often restricted in distribution to just one island or island group,” explains the researcher. “Yet, we know relatively little about them. Even large species of reptiles and mammals are regularly being discovered, not to mention amphibians and invertebrates. This is what makes it such a biologically valuable and fascinating region.”

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Original source:

Weijola V, Donnellan SC, Lindqvist C (2016) A new blue-tailed Monitor lizard (Reptilia, Squamata, Varanus) of the Varanus indicus group from Mussau Island, Papua New Guinea.ZooKeys 568: 129-154. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.568.6872

New snake species with pitch black eyes from the Andes highlights hidden diversity

Extremely rare and hidden in the forests of the Andes, there are still new snake species left to find. This has recently been evidenced by the colubrid serpent, described for the first time in the present article. Moreover, there is the vicious circle enwrapping its relatives: the harder it is to find more specimens, the tougher it is to describe and thus, start to identify them, which does not help in mapping their distribution and habitats. To address this issue, Dr. R. Alexander Pyron, The George Washington University, and his international research team have included a taxonomic review and discussion on the relationships and origin within a non-venomous snake tribe in a paper, published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

Slender and small, the new species, called Synophis zaheri, measures less than 40 cm in length, or between 351 and 372 mm. Contrasting to its slim body with a distinct neck, separating the head from the body, its eyes are large and bulging, making up for more than a third of its head. Being black in colour, it is hard to tell the pupil and the iris apart. While the upper part of the body is grayish-brown with an iridescent sheen, the abdominal side stands out with its yellowish-white colouration.

Typically for the tribe, where the new species has been placed, it is also characterised with a highly modified spine and an enlarged scale row running over it. This is also where the name of this group of snakes comes from with “Diaphorolepidini” consisting of the Greek words for “differentiated” and “scales”. Not so clear, however, is the name of the genus, which the authors have translated also from Greek as “with snake”, but find themselves unaware of the meaning behind. The species is named after Dr. Hussam El-Dine Zaher, a Brazilian herpetologist whose work has been foundational for South American snakes.

In conclusion, the scientists note that the rarity of the observed snake species, especially the genus, where the new serpent belongs, accounts for the unclear species-boundaries as well as for the myriad of undescribed species. “Dipsadine diversity in the Andes is clearly underestimated, and new species are still being discovered in the 21st century,” they point out.

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Original source:

Pyron RA, Guayasamin JM, Peñafiel N, Bustamante L, Arteaga A (2015) Systematics of Nothopsini (Serpentes, Dipsadidae), with a new species of Synophis from the Pacific Andean slopes of southwestern Ecuador. ZooKeys 541: 109-147. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.541.6058

How to catch a small squid? First records for the Gulf of California and southwest Mexico

Often avoiding sampling gear with their capability to detect movements and swim their way out of the nets fast enough, the small squids living in the open-ocean zone have so long gone under-researched. The present study, conducted by Dr. Michel Hendrickx, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and his team, seems to provide new and first distributional records of five such species for the Gulf of California and in southwestern Mexico. It also significantly expands the currently known southernmost limit of localities of some of these squids in the eastern Pacific. The research is available in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The researched five squid species belong to two genera, Abraliopsis and Pterygioteuthis, which although abundant and diverse, have long been shrouded by taxonomic and distributional controversies. To solve them, the researchers used specimens, collected over the span of thirteen years, comprising eight cruises across 113 locations in the Gulf of California and off the southwestern coast of Mexico.

As a result, the scientists concluded a significantly wider distributional range of the species they found. For instance, squids of the Abraliopsis genus were surprisingly found in water deeper than 600 m during the day.

The studied small squids are of high ecological value due to their vital position in the food web. Members of Abraliopsis are important preys for many fishes and mammals, such as the peruvian hake, the Indo-Pacific sailfish, the common dolphinfish and the local sharks. Meanwhile, the representatives of the other researched genus, Pterygioteuthis, are often consumed by larger cephalopods, sea-birds and fur seals. However, their abundance is strongly dependent on temperature, especially when there are fast and significant changes.

The scientists suggest that additional samplings with more adequate equipment, like faster large-sized mid-water trawls, could further bridge the knowledge gaps about these elusive marine inhabitants.

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Original source:

Hendrickx ME, Urbano B, Zamorano P (2015) Distribution of pelagic squids Abraliopsis Joubin, 1896 (Enoploteuthidae) and Pterygioteuthis P. Fischer, 1896 (Pyroteuthidae) (Cephalopoda, Decapodiformes, Oegopsida) in the Mexican Pacific. ZooKeys 537: 51-64. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.537.6023.