The Race for Species Discovery: 11 new marine species and a new platform for rapid species description established
A new paper, the Ocean Species Discoveries (OSD), is a ground-breaking experiment aimed at uniting independent taxonomists into a cohesive consortium. This collaborative effort, involving twenty-five researchers from ten countries, boasts the discovery of eleven new marine species, including deep-sea chitons found on methane seeps, mysterious hole-making amphipods, and wrinkly hydrothermal vent limpets. This initiative also represents a significant step forward in accelerating the pace at which new marine species are described and published.
Accelerating global change continues to threaten Earth’s vast biodiversity, including that of the largely unexplored oceans. To date, only a small fraction of an estimated two million total living marine species have been named and described. A major challenge is the speed at which new species are being taxonomically described and published – a critical milestone for efforts to study and protect these species. The current scientific and publishing landscape often results in decades-long delays (20-40 years) from the discovery of a new species to its description. The Ocean Species Discoveries was launched as a new platform for rapid but thorough taxonomic descriptions of marine invertebrate taxa.
The Ocean Species Discoveries is coordinated by the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), a project of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt. SOSA’s goal is to accelerate the discovery, protection and awareness of marine invertebrate species before they become extinct. The project coordinated 25 different co-authors to contribute thirteen marine invertebrate taxa, including one new genus, eleven new species, and one redescription and reinstatement. The species, which originate from all over the globe and at depths from 5.2 to 7081 meters, are brought together in the open access publication in the Biodiversity Data Journal (LINK).
Lepetodrilus marianae is a wrinkly-shelled limpet that lives on hydrothermal vents, underwater volcanoes in the deep-sea where temperatures can reach 400 degrees C. It is one of the new species included in the Ocean Species Discoveries, along with Cunicolomaera grata, a curious amphipod whose burrows along the seafloor perplexed scientists. Normally, the descriptions for these two very different species wouldn’t be in the same publication, but this is the ingenuity of this new publication format: that species descriptions from different marine invertebrate taxa can be published together in one ‘mega-publication,’ an approach that offers a huge incentive for authors through increased citation and speeds up the rate at which discoveries and descriptions can be made public.
“Currently, there’s a notable delay in naming and describing new animals, often because journals expect additional ecological or phylogenetic insights. This leads many marine species to go undescribed due to lack of data. OSD addresses this by offering concise, complete taxonomic descriptions without requiring a specific theme, refocusing attention on taxonomy’s importance.” -Dr. Torben Riehl
Reducing the time it takes to get from discovering a new animal to a public species description is crucial in our era of increasing biodiversity loss. The wrinkly-shelled limpet, and two other species described in the Ocean Species Notes, live in hydrothermal vent zones – an environment threatened by deep-sea mining. Another OSD species, Psychropotes buglossa, is a purple sea cucumber, sometimes also called a gummy squirrel due to its squishy body and tail-like sail. Gummy squirrels are known to live in areas of high economic interest, where polymetallic-nodule extraction could soon take place and endanger the animals. Threats like these risk driving species to extinction before we even get the chance to know and study them. And without a scientific name and description, protecting these species and their ocean home becomes considerably more difficult. Through efforts like SOSA’s Ocean Species Discoveries, we can get closer to understanding the biodiversity of our oceans and protecting it before it’s too late.
“Only by leveraging the collective strengths of global progress, expertise, and technological advancements, will we be able to describe the estimated 1.8 million unknown species living in our oceans. Every taxonomist specialized on some group of marine invertebrates is invited to contribute to the Ocean Species Discoveries.” -Prof. Dr. Julia Sigwart
