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New species of “supergiant” isopod uncovered
- lxe 6y agoCached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_LOT09jUbVIJ:https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/new-species-supergiant-isopod-uncovered+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_LOT09... These things are cool.
- kanobo 6y agoSorry, the site is down now, but here is a cached version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200826125737/https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/new-species-supergiant-isopod-uncovered https://web.archive.org/web/20200826125737/https://news.nus....
- ncmncm 6y agoThis might be a relative of our pill bugs? But there is probably a lot more evolution between them than between, e.g., horses and sharks. Which, by the way, is also bigger than between bony fish and sharks.
- Sniffnoy 6y agoYes, pill bugs are also isopods.
- sixdimensional 6y agoI've always been fascinated by pill bugs, also known as "Armadillidiidae" [1] they are such cool creatures. I don't know why, but the fact that they are land-dwelling crustaceans was just interesting to me. I had no idea something like this size and related existed in the sea! Incredible! I wonder now what the evolutionary tree looks like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillidiidae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillidiidae
- sixdimensional 6y agoOrder Isopoda [1] on Wikipedia if anyone else is interested. Edit: Corrected Family -> Order - oops! Thank you pvaldes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopoda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopoda
- pvaldes 6y agoIsopoda is an Order. This is in family Cirolanidae, so it has much smaller cousins in each beach. It seems there is an opportunity here, crouching like a cat, to dedicate one of this new species to Hayao Miyazaki. Bathynomus ohmu seems an pretty convenient name also. Maybe the next.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 6y agoSorry, wrong direction: sharks and horses are closer than sharks and tuna.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago> The team says that the discovery is an example of deep-sea gigantism Are there theories about this phenomenon? Does this explain the historically atypical size of the dinosaurs? Why doesn't it continue to happen? For example, why aren't there giant robins (birds) or tiny ones? Is there not a single eco-system ever where this would be an advantage? From another article on the same discovery
- rsynnott 6y agoIt does, generally on islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism Humans tend to exterminate them.
- mc32 6y agoI think that’s an over generalization. The La Brea tarpit types were extinguished due to climate change. It’s also postulated mammoths and such were also affected by climate change, food availability and hunting. None the less, before humans came on the scene large animals came and went. Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction.
- rsynnott 6y agoWell, sure, there are loads that died out before humans showed up. But of those that existed when we showed up, we have exterminated almost all of them. > Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction. Often it wasn't even hunting. New Zealand's various giant ground parrots weren't THAT delicious. We introduced invasive species which did the extermination for us, in that case (and many/most bird-y cases, at least).
- snori74 6y agoHard to know how you could state this so confidently, snacked on a kakapo recently?
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- goldenkey 6y agoIs it 𝓘𝓼𝓸𝓹𝓸𝓭 𝓗𝓸𝓾𝓻 yet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHxlZ4dTXug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHxlZ4dTXug
- C4ne 6y agoCould we leave these animals out in the ocean please? I know that there will be people that want to eat them because it gives them some kind of superpower you‘ve never heard of. But if you look at the year 2020 you may know that wild species can give you wild diseases. Or maybe we just limit interaction with these species only to scientists ghat know how to handle them.
- ycombonator 6y agoYou got downvoted by CCP
- steve_adams_86 6y agoI understand the sentiment to a point, but isn’t it essentially impossible to get diseases from deep sea isopods? If we should be exploring any unknown creatures, deep sea creatures seem relatively safe if you are aiming to avoid transmissible diseases. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know much about this stuff.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> The new giant isopod species was described from two specimens, ... 950 and 1,260 metres, during the South Java Deep Sea Biodiversity Expedition 2018 If you skim-read the article, you might end up with a very different picture in your head.
- _jal 6y agoThey're still pretty big, but not destroying Tokyo anytime soon.
- progval 6y agoYou missed an important part of the sentence: > collected off the southern coast of West Java in Indonesia, from a depth of between 950 and 1,260 metres the specimens were not 1km long.
- dane-pgp 6y agoYou missed an important part of the sentence: > skim-read I then went back to read the sentence properly, but thank you for including the missing part for those who didn't read the article.
- progval 6y agoIndeed, my bad. I misunderstood your comment as saying skim-readers might miss that sentence and only see the sizes on pictures.
- gridlockd 6y agoI'm kinda disappointed, these aren't much larger than the giant isopods that you can buy at a well-stocked Asian grocery.