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Press release WoRMS

Ten remarkable new marine species from 2018

 

EMBARGO: 00:01 GMT March 19th, 2019
Contacts: Tammy Horton: +44 7795804581; +442380596352; tammy.horton@noc.ac.uk
Leen Vandepitte: leen.vandepitte@vliz.be
Please contact authors of individual species for information on these, and Tammy Horton or Leen Vandepitte for information on the top-ten list and the World Register of Marine Species.
High-resolution photos available online. See section "Image available at:" with each individual species.

The PDF version of the press release is available here.

 

 

This year we have released our list of the top-ten marine species of 2018 to coincide with World Taxonomist Appreciation day - March 19th! 

If you were unaware of this celebration of all the work that taxonomists do, you can find more here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/taxonomistappreciationday, and here https://smallpondscience.com/2014/03/19/today-is-taxonomist-appreciation-day/ and here https://cetaf.org/news/19th-march-taxonomist-appreciation-day.

Every day in labs, museums, out on fieldwork, taxonomists are busy collecting, cataloguing, identifying, comparing, describing and naming species new to science. Some 300 taxonomists globally also contribute their valuable time to keeping the World Register of Marine Species up to date.  Today is a chance for us at WoRMS to thank our taxonomic editors for this important task. And we celebrate the work of taxonomists now with the WoRMS list of the top-ten marine species described in 2018 as nominated and voted for by taxonomists!

This top-ten list is just a small highlight of almost 2,000 fascinating new marine species discovered every year.

 

How were the species chosen?

All editors of WoRMS were given the opportunity to nominate their favourite marine species from the last year (2018).  Nominated species must have been described between January 1st and December 31st, 2018, and have come from the marine environment (including fossil taxa but excluding freshwater or terrestrial taxa). A small committee (including both taxonomists and data managers) was brought together to decide upon the final candidates.  The list is in no hierarchical order.

The final decisions reflect the immense diversity of animal groups in the marine environment (including fish, crustaceans, molluscs, corals, sponges, jellies, worms) and highlight some of the challenges facing the marine environment today (e.g. invasive species, ecosystems threatened by climate change, deep-sea environments impacted by resource extraction). The final candidates also feature particularly astonishing marine creatures, notable for their interest to both science and the public.

Each of these marine animals has a story. From the bizarre blanket hermit crab which uses an anemone ‘blanket’ instead of a shell for a home, the Hong Kong Sea Dragon, a species which is only the second to be described in its phylum, to a ‘walking’ deep-sea leech!

 

About the WoRMS top-ten list of Marine Species

After 250 years of describing, naming and cataloguing the species we share our planet with, we are still some way off achieving a complete census. However, we do know that at least 247,000 marine species have been described because their names are managed in WoRMS by almost 300 scientists located all over the world.  

In 2018, to celebrate a decade of WoRMS' existence, we compiled a list of our top marine species, both for 2017 and for the previous decade in order to highlight the fascinating discoveries of the numerous new marine species being made every year (see https://www.lifewatch.be//en/2018.04.23-WoRMS-LifeWatch-press-release).

A list of the 'Top Ten Species' described from ALL habitats and taxa has been announced annually since 2008 (http://www.esf.edu/top10/). The oceans cover over 70% of the surface of our planet, and yet they still include the least explored regions (http://theconversation.com/how-many-undiscovered-creatures-are-there-in-the-ocean-86705). Although the ESF list often contains one or two marine species, we decided to pay homage to the ‘largest habitat on earth’ by producing our own list of the top marine species.

We hope some of our favourites will make it to the global list!

 

Ten remarkable new marine species from 2018