It’s the most unexplored habitat in the world.” “We know maybe 10 percent, or even less, of the marine fauna. “Deep-sea diversity is really, really unknown,” said Rodríguez-Flores. All of which adds urgency to scientists’ desire to discover and study these animals before it’s too late. This change is important for more than just the squat lobster: Many of the creatures lurking in the ocean’s depths remain a mystery, and new human activities, like ocean floor mining, could soon threaten their very existence. Now, with this latest discovery of new species (one of which is called Munidopsis girguisi in honor of Peter Girguis, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard), the study’s authors call for a reclassification of all squat lobster species to better capture their geographic distribution and evolutionary history. There are more than a thousand known species of squat lobster - which are closer to hermit crabs than the Maine lobster - and dozens more new species are discovered every year, which suggests their true diversity is still poorly understood. In a new study published in Invertebrate Systematics, she and a team of researchers identified five new species of deep-sea squat lobsters in the Munidopsidae family. By college, she had turned her attention to seabound invertebrates such as sea sponges, urchins, shrimp, and squat lobster, Rodríguez-Flores’ specialty. “Like really, really obsessed,” said the biodiversity postdoctoral fellow, who works in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.Īs a youngster in her native Madrid, Rodríguez-Flores captured beetles in jars and brought her finds to bed with her. "The ecological diversity of the Gulf of Mexico may be more complex than thought," Huang tells Live Science's Patrick Pester in an email.Paula Rodríguez-Flores has always been obsessed with invertebrates.
yucatanensis.īeing able to identify these species could be important to conservation: The researchers conclude that some giant isopods are targets of deep-sea trawl fisheries, so “it is important to know precisely which species are being caught.”īesides, the new discovery gives scientists a clearer picture of what’s out there on the ocean floor. maxeyorum, which was described in 2016, B. As of now, though, this finding brings the total to three- B. The researchers suggest there may be other Bathynomus species still undiscovered in the Gulf of Mexico. Plus, it has longer antennae and a thorax that’s shaped like an inverted triangle, rather than an oval.
giganteus, this new species “has more slender body proportions and is shorter in total length,” the authors write. “The two species likely had a common ancestor,” the researchers write.Ĭompared to B. giganteus-the isopod that it was originally mistaken for. They found that the closest relative of the new-to-science B. The authors constructed an evolutionary tree, mapping the relationships between this and other isopods. yucatanensis specimen was collected between about 1,970 and 2,625 feet below sea level, per a statement.ī.yucatanensis looks like its land-dwelling isopod relative, the common woodlouse (also called a pill bug or roly poly)-but at 10 inches long and 5 inches wide, B. Before being housed at the Japanese aquarium, the B.
They dubbed it Bathynomus yucatanensis, after Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where it was captured in 2017.Īround 20 living Bathynomus, or giant isopod, species are known, but they are rarely seen by humans because they live so deep in the ocean. Huang and two other experts describe the new isopod in a study published in the Journal of Natural History. “At first, I thought it was contamination, so I repeated the sequencing experiment several times,” Huang tells New Scientist's Corryn Wetzel. giganteus and this isopod, which meant this individual appeared to be something new. The genetic sequence showed at least 35 differences between B. Then, while researching isopod genetics, Huang Ming-Chih from Taiwan’s National University of Tainan sequenced its DNA. This cream-colored crustacean was originally mistaken for its larger relative, called Bathynomus giganteus.
Scientists have discovered a new giant isopod species among the sea creatures held in a Japanese aquarium. It might seem unlikely that one of these species could be missed while in plain sight, but that’s exactly what’s happened, until now. Giant isopods are like something out of a science fiction novel-these massive, armored crustaceans use 14 legs to crawl along the ocean floor at staggering depths.
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