Top 10 New Species for 2011

It is that time of year again. The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University released the top 10 new species of 2011.

Last year I wrote about my favorite on the 2010 list, the Dracula minnow. Measuring just 17 millimeters long when fully grown, this little minnow, while tiny, is a close relative of the common goldfish, the carp, and the other minnows you might have known from childhood. Many of your pet store variety fishes are in this group of carps and carp-like fishes. And, if you have looked closely at Goldy residing in your child’s fish bowl, you might have noticed Goldy has no teeth. This group of fishes has been around for a long time, and, in fact, lost anything even resembling true teeth nearly 50 million years ago. But, the Dracula minnow has developed bony spurs on its jaws that project through the skin and look just like nasty fangs.

My favorite for 2011 is, of course, another fish. This year it is the pancake batfish. Batfish are all-around oddly cool fish. They are flat, live on the bottom, and rarely swim. Instead, they walk. Their paired fins, normally located on the sides of a fish, are located more or less underneath the fish. And, they walk on these fins, like feet. They walk all over the bottom of the ocean.

This particular batfish is pretty special because it was only discovered because of the Gulf Oil Spill. Turns out it lives pretty much only where the oil was. Scientists had not explored the region that intensely prior to the spill, and upon investigating the spill’s impact, found this little critter.

This year’s list also contains a cricket that pollinates orchids, a fruit-eating monitor lizard that measures over 6-feet in length, a glowing fungus, an iron-eating bacterium discovered on the hull of the Titanic, a jumping cockroach, and a species of antelope called a duiker, a leech with teeth so large it is named after the famed T. rex.

Dracula Minnow

Recently I wrote about the vampire squid, and I argued that I really didn’t have to look any further for a more flashy, eye-grabbing title. I stand corrected. A group of scientists recently discovered a new minnow, and it has got a pair of choppers projecting from its jaws that earned it the name ‘dracula’. International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University recently named it one of the top 10 new species of 2010.

Measuring just 17 millimeters long when fully grown, this little minnow, while tiny, is a close relative of the common goldfish, the carp, and the other minnows you might have known from childhood. Many of your pet store variety fishes are in this group of carps and carp-like fishes. And, if you have looked closely at Goldy residing in your child’s fish bowl, you might have noticed Goldy has no teeth. This group of fishes has been around for a long time, and, in fact, lost anything even resembling true teeth nearly 50 million years ago. But, the dracula minnow has developed bony spurs on its jaws that project through the skin and look just like nasty fangs.

Just the male has these fangs. Why? It is completely unknown. This little fish is completely transparent. And, it is so small because its development was apparently truncated somehow. So, the adults look like they are still larval fishes. They possess at least forty fewer bones than other closely related adult fishes.

Other species on this list include an amazing carnivorous (yep, meat-eating) sponge, and bug-eating slug, an electric fish, a psychedelic frogfish, a tiny new mushroom with the scientific name Phallus (I’ll let you Google it to see why it earned this name, though you probably don’t have to think too hard to figure it out), a new species of yam from Madagascar, a giant orb-weaving spider in which the female is four times larger than the male (they managed to figure out the male and female were of the same species), a deep-sea worm that shoots glowing green blobs of goo at its predators, and a giant carnivorous pitcher-plant the size of a football.

What's In a Name?

Names are important - they tell us what things are, and what they are not.

Recently, two high-schoolers from Trinity High School in New York undertook a most amazing science project. With the help of Rockefeller University and the American Museum Of Natural History, they collected objects around them to determine their DNA identities. They compared the DNA sequences from their objects to a DNA library known in the scientific community as GenBank.

Their first finding was, unfortunately, not unusual among such studies. They found that 17% of the food products that they tested were actually misrepresented by the names on their labels (see press release). Such food products included a brand of sheep's milk cheese that was actually made from cow's milk, venison dog treats made of beef; gourmet sturgeon caviar that was actually Mississippi paddlefish, a delicacy called “dried shark” which was freshwater Nile perch, dried smelt that was instead Japanese anchovy, and “Caribbean Red snapper” that turned out to be Malabar blood snapper from Southeast Asia.

Their study is the latest of many papers that have cast doubt on the foods we eat, particularly some of the more extravagant ones. Last year, two other students from Trinity High School tested the sushi in local restaurants and found that other fish species were often substituted from some of the higher end ones. Of course, despite being rather underhanded, this may work out in the fishes’ favor, as the cheaper fish tend to be more abundant (which is why they are cheaper), and are perhaps less threatened by fishing pressure. But, this is not universally so. Fish that cannot be traded legally often get processed and sold under pseudonyms. A full 25% of fish tested in that study proved to be entirely other fish. Of these, at least one was a species that is farmed and on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s ‘safe’ list (but it is not nearly worth the price of the species it was masquerading as), and another was a federally listed endangered species.

Their second finding was truly inspired. The pair discovered what is potentially a new species of cockroach. If it proves to be new to science, the two will get to choose its name. This means both a common name, and its scientific name - the name that will be recognized by scientists the world over, no matter what language they speak, as belonging to this species and this species only.

The scientific name is a latin name consisting of two parts; a binomial consisting of the genus and species names. For example, we are Homo sapiens, of the genus ‘Homo’, and the species ‘sapiens’. Note that species are never referred to as just their species name. So, we would never call ourselves just ‘sapiens.’ We are Homo sapiens, or H. sapiens. Also note that the species portion of the binomial is not capitalized; only the generic, or genus, name. And, that the genus and species names are italicized.

The name of the common cockroach in New York City, the American cockroach, is known the world over as Periplaneta americana. The cockroach was, in fact, named by Carl Lineaus, the Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician who developed the binomial naming system. He named and classified over 1200 species of plants and animals. Many of those names, like Periplaneta americana, are still in use today. Hopefully, the name for this new species of cockroach will persist for as long.