new animals discovery

An Even-Weirder-Than-Usual Tardigrade Just Turned Up                                 in a Parking Lot

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A new species of tardigrade (not shown here) was discovered in a parking lot in Japan.

Credit: Shutterstock

A newfound species of tardigrade, or "water bear," with tendril-festooned eggs has been discovered in the parking lot of an apartment building in Japan.

The newfound tardigrade, Macrobiotus shonaicus, is the 168th species of this sturdy micro-animal ever discovered in Japan. Tardigrades are famous for their toughness: They can survive in extreme cold (down to minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 Celsius), extreme heat (more than 300 degrees F, or 149 degrees C), and even the unrelenting radiationand vacuum of space, as one 2008 study reported.

They're bizarre and adorable at the same time, with eight legs on a rotund little body (they're usually far less than a millimeter in length) and circular mouths that make them look perpetually surprised.

Kazuharu Arakawa, a researcher who studies the molecular biology of tardigrades at Japan's Keio University, discovered the newfound species in a small sample of moss. He'd scraped the moss from the parking lot of his apartment in Tsuruoka City along the Sea of Japan. [Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures]

"Most of [the] tardigrade species were described from mosses and lichens — thus any cushion of moss seems to be interesting for people working on tardigrades," Arakawa told Live Science in an email. But, he said, "it was quite surprising to find a new species around my apartment!"

Spaghetti eggs

Arakawa routinely samples moss he finds around town, he said, but the portion from his parking lot turned out to be special. The tardigrades he found there could survive and reproduce in a laboratory environment, which is very rare for these creatures, he said.

He sequenced the tiny animal's genome and only then realized that it matched no previously found tardigrade sequence. Arakawa looped in tardigrade expert Łukasz Michalczyk of Jagiellonian University in Poland, and the researchers determined that they had a newfound species on their hands. 

The species ranges in length from 318 micrometers to 743 micrometers. It has the typical plump-caterpillar look of a tardigrade, and its O-shaped mouth is ringed by three rows of teeth. It can live on algae, which is odd because other species in the Macrobiotus genus are carnivores that eat even tinier animals called rotifers, Arakawa said. [In Photos: The World's Freakiest Looking Animals]

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of M. shonaicus, though, is its eggs. The spherical eggs are studded with miniscule, chalice-shaped protrusions, each of which is topped with a ring of delicate, noodle-like filaments. These features might help the egg attach to the surface where it is laid, Arakawa said. 

A Macrobiotus shonaicus egg under the microscope.

Credit: Stec et al (2018)

Tardigrade family tree

The newfound species is part of a set of tardigrade species, known as the hufelandi group, that all have these cup-like egg decorations, Arakawa and his team reported today (Feb. 28) in the open-access journal PLOS One. Macrobiotus hufelandi was the first tardigrade species ever discovered, way back in 1834. That species was found in Italy and Germany originally, but it and its close relatives have now been found all over the globe, Arakawa said. 

The newfound tardigrade, Macrobiotus shonaicus, has a circular mouth ringed by three rows of teeth.

Credit: Daniel Stec et al., PLOS ONE, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192210

"This is the first report of a new species in this complex from East Asia," he said. More tardigrade-hunting is necessary to find out how tardigrades diversified and adapted over time, he said.

Also exciting is that M. shonaicus can thrive in the lab, Arakawa said.

"It is an ideal model to study the sexual-reproduction machinery and behaviors of tardigrades," he said. "We are actually already submitting another paper describing their mating behaviors."  

2)New 'Slasher' Wasp Comes Equipped with Its Own Body                                                  Saw

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The new parasitoid wasp species, Dendrocerus scutellaris, wears a saw of sorts on its back.

Credit: Carolyn Trietsch

Freddy Krueger, eat your heart out. A new species of parasitic waspcomes equipped with built-in saws, which the killer insect may use to slice its way out of its host's body.

In a new paper published Jan. 30 in Biodiversity Data Journal, researchers from Penn State and the Natural History Museum in London report the discovery of Dendrocerus scutellaris, a wasp less than 0.1 inches (3 millimeters) long that sports a series of jagged spines along its back.

Based on the wasp's anatomy, researchers suspect it is an endoparasitoid, a type of wasp that lays its eggs inside a host, often a caterpillar or adult insect. The eggs hatch, and the larvae feed on the host from the inside out. When the food supply runs out and the larvae mature into their adult forms, they chew their way out of the host. [Zombie Animals: 5 Real-Life Cases of Body-Snatching]

D. scutellaris lacks the pointy jaws that most endoparasitoid wasps use to gnaw their way out of their hosts. For that reason, the study authors argue that the saw-like structure on the wasp's back is its ticket to escape; when it's time to free itself, the wasp may rub the structure — called a mesoscutellar comb — against the inside of the host to slice its way out.

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Researchers haven't seen this behavior in the wild; they discovered D. scutellaris in the collections of London's Natural History Museum. Some specimens of the species had been in storage, unexamined and unidentified, until they were loaned to Penn State's Frost Museum.

Some other species in the genus Dendrocerus have been discovered previously, and several are parasites of parasites that live inside aphids, the researchers wrote. Besides its saw-like comb, the new species also has dramatic branching antennae, which may help it sense mates or potential hosts.