Los Angeles thread milipedes have avoided the limelight despite being in the heart of entertainment. But when researchers spotted it, they knew they’d found a creature worthy of center stage.
You can also find out more about the following: Newfound speciesIllacme socal)Researchers reported June 21 in ZooKeys. It’s just the third known species in this genus, a group of millipedes that stands out for their subterranean lifestyles and isolation from relatives.
I. Socal “looks like somebody plucked a thread out of their shirt,” says Paul Marek, a millipede biologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
In 2018, naturalists Cedric Lee of the University of California at Berkeley and James Bailey found the millipede during a slug hunting expedition in Lake Forest. While hunting for gelatinous gastropods, they stumbled upon a millipede unlike any they’d seen before. The two uploaded a record to iNaturalist — an app where users can share photos of organisms that they find with others — and identified the specimen by its family, Siphonophoridae.
Marek, who is an iNaturalist enthusiast, has alerts setup for These kinds of animals (SN: 12/21/21). His interest was piqued by the discovery, as he knew that this family only lived in California hundreds of kilometers north from Los Angeles. Lake Forest lies about 80 km (50 miles), southeast of the city. Marek and Lee teamed up to solve this myriapod puzzle.
Marek visited Lake Forest, California during his Christmas holiday to search for more millipedes. “We collected around 10 individuals to get a good understanding of the variation” in what the critter looks like, he says. He then studied the males’ gonopods — sperm transfer organs that evolved from leg segments — to see if they matched any known species. “They were distinct,” Marek says. Genome sequences confirmed the Los Angeles Millipedes as a newly discovered species.
Marek is dubbed as the species I. Socal The team wanted to make sure that the Los Angeles thread-millipede was easily identifiable, so they gave it a stage name. “If species are known by their common names,” Marek says, “it’s helpful for subsequent conservation action.”
The millipedes that live in the soil are different from those found near the surface. IllacmeGenus love to dig down. “They live this almost completely subterranean lifestyle,” says Derek Hennen, a myriapod biologist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville who was not involved in the study but who has worked with Marek. So it’s not too surprising that the newfound species went undiscovered for so long. The closest relatives are Illacme are “either in South Africa or maybe Chile,” Hennen says.
Marek Says I. Socal This is proof of how much diversity lies hidden in the soil below us. “This is really a frontier of biodiversity. There’s a lot more stuff under our feet.”
