The world's tiniest chameleon, Brookesia micra.FRANK GLAW and JÖRN KÖHLER
Researchers
described roughly 15,000 to 18,000 new species in 2012, making choosing
the most noteworthy a monstrous task. “[It’s] worse than asking me
which of my children is my favorite,” quipped
Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist at Arizona State University, in an email to
The Scientist. Wheeler and his colleagues at the
International Institute for Species Exploration
will eventually publish a top ten list of this year’s new species, but
the ranking criteria “are as diverse as the species themselves,” he
said.
Some of this year’s new species were encountered by researchers deep in
the field. Others were recognized from museum specimens—long after the
“new” species themselves had gone extinct, noted Benoît Fontaine, a
conservation biologist at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in
Paris. Even so, cataloging new species is an important task, said
Fontaine. “We know only small part of extant biodiversity,” he noted.
“It’s the tip of iceberg.”
In celebration of biodiversity, here a few of 2012’s most exciting new species, and a fond farewell to a few more.
Human cousins
One of the newly identified species of slow loris, Nycticebus kayan.CH'IEN C. LEE
The
discovery of primate species that are new to science is quite rare, but
this year researchers described at least two. Researchers from the
United States and United Kingdom stumbled across a previously
unrecognized species of slow loris (
Nycticebus kayan), small nocturnal primates related to lemurs, while surveying slow lorises in Borneo and the Philippines
. Like its relatives, the new species has
endearingly wide eyes and small statures—but extremely poisonous bites.
Slow lorises lick a toxin-secreting gland on their arm to create
venomous saliva, which they use to deter predators. Unfortunately, slow
lorises are popular in the pet trade. To keep future owners safe, their
captors often remove the loris’s fangs, but this usually ends in the
primate’s death, as they can no longer feed properly.
A lesula monkey, Cercopithecus lomamiensis.JOHN HART
The sleepy-eyed lesula (
Cercopithecus lomamiensis)
was also officially added to the books in 2012. Well-known to locals
near its Congo forest home, the lesula is only the second monkey species
in its genus. The animal is light in color, making it easily
distinguishable from its closest relations, the dark-furred owl-faced
monkeys. John Hart of the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation and the
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, who described the species in
PLOS ONE,
said the first lesula example his team studied was being kept as a pet
by a schoolteacher’s daughter. When investigating the nearby forest, the
group “expected to find something unusual, maybe a range extension [of a
known species],” Hart explained. “But we were never prepared to find a
new species.”
Though humans don’t farm or mine the forest, lesulas are threatened by
the bush meat trade. Having depleted richer sources of bushmeat, hunters
will travel “hundreds of kilometers” to hunt monkeys, Hart said. Smoked
bushmeat is then sold in urban centers, where many people have no other
protein options. But recognition of the lesula as a new species may aid
conservation efforts, he added.
Distinctive genitalia
Juvenile Brookesia micra.FRANK GLAW and JÖRN KÖHLER
For some animal species, their genitalia are the best way to identify them. Scientists described a new species (
Phallostethus cuulong),
belonging to the priapum fish family, whose penises erupt from their
chins. This bizarre method of identification is the best for
Madagascar’s miniature Malagasy leaf chameleons, which can be
distinguished by subtle differences in the shape of their hempenes, the
reproductive organs held inside their body until mating. But the
newest—and tiniest—member, called
Brookesia micra, can be easily identified without getting too intimate.
B. micra is about an inch long with “a very, very short tail. The tail has even sometimes a reddish color. It’s totally unique,” said
Miguel Vences, a zoologist at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, who led the study identifying the miniscule critter.
Teeny tiny fly
World's tiniest fly, Euryplatea nanaknihali.INNA-MARIE STRAZHNIK
This year also saw the discovery of the
world’s tiniest fly, identified by entomologist
Brian Brown at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Nearly microscopic at less than half a millimeter in length,
Euryplatea nanaknihali—named
for a young entomology enthusiast who often visits Brown’s
museum—belongs to a group of flies that parasitize ants. Brown, who
first spotted the fly in an insect trap in Thailand, knew at first sight
that
E. nanaknihali was unusual. It is a “very odd” looking
fly, said Brown, having “a rounded teardrop shape that makes it hard to
grab, and short stubby broad wings a smoky grey in color. . . . Most
people would probably think it’s a beetle.”
The tiny fly belongs to a group that lays their eggs in an ant’s head.
As the fly larvae develop, they feed on the ant’s tissue until “the
ant’s head falls off, sometimes as its body is still walking around,”
Brown said.
New lion on the block
Addis Ababa lion.JOERG JUNHOLD and KLAUS EULENBERGER, LEIPZIG ZOO
In
another boon for biodiversity, researchers confirmed this year that a
population of
Ethiopian lions with a unique dark mane are indeed
genetically distinct
from other lions in other areas. Descended from a founder population
collected by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1948, the lions are known to
scientists from the Addis Ababa Zoo, though reports of dark-maned lions
in the wild also exist.
Researchers used the sequence of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene and
various microsatellites to ascertain that the dark-maned lions are
genetically separate from other lions. The news has already given the
lions a boost, said Susann Bruche, a biologist at Imperial College
London and first author of the paper. Zoo officials have raised money
for a better lion enclosure, based on natural habitats, which will give
the lions more space to breed and maintain their population.
A few goodbyes
Copper-striped blue-tailed skink.CHRIS BROWN, USGS
The
International Union for Conservation of Nature,
which puts out the Red List assessing species’ extinction risks, lists
795 species as extinct. But each year, often due to human encroachment,
that list grows. Hawaii, the poster child for the havoc wreaked by
invasive species—and the heroic efforts to combat them—announced the
local extinction of the
copper-striped blue-tailed skink this year, possibly due to torment by predatory ants. Luckily, blue-tailed skink populations persist on other Pacific Islands.
Japan announced the extinction of the
Japanese river otter,
an iconic creature not seen for more than 30 years. Japan’s Ministry of
Environment also declared several other species extinct, including the
least horseshoe bat.
Lonesome George.WIKIPEDIA, putnymark
And finally, the Galápagos’s
Lonesome George,
the long-lived Pinta Island giant tortoise believed to be the last of
his kind, died this summer. More than 100 years old, Lonesome George was
introduced to several female tortoises in hopes of producing hybrids,
but the eggs laid never hatched. But amidst the sorrow of his passing,
some scientists retain hope. New work by evolutionary biologist
Adalgisa Caccone at Yale University suggests that a few Pinta Island tortoises may still exist—and be successfully
hybridizing with the locals—at
Volcano Wolf on nearby Isabela Island. Caccone and her colleagues
compared the DNA of more than 1,600 Volcano Wolf tortoises to a DNA
database of extinct tortoises collected from museum specimens, and
discovered that 17, including some juveniles, had DNA from
C. abingdoni ancestors.
