Exciting news for anyone with a fascination for biological taxonomy — in the plants and critters version of American Idol, scientists from the International Institute for Species Exploration announced the top ten new species discovered in 2010. Apparently the winners were selected out of a field of 18,000, which is pretty stiff competition and must have made the shortlisting quite a challenge. It was an equal opportunity finish, though, with representation from insects and spiders, bovidae (or cloven-hoofed mammals, if you prefer), bacteria, fungi and highly unpleasant-looking leechy things, among other families.
Personally, I could have continued quite happily in my ignorance of the existence of Saltoblattella montistabularis, or the Leaproach as it’s more commonly (not to mention disconcertingly) known, a cockroach able to jump several times its own height. The crawling-on-the-ground species are quite creepy enough, one would have thought.
If you prefer a more science-fictiony flavor to your waking nightmares, look no further than Tyrannobdella rex, discovered in all its leechy glory up the nose of a little girl in Peru. It looks very much like a wrinkly fang-mouthed thumb; definitely not the kind of thing you’d want rootling around in your nasal passages.
Less unsettling are the ”eternal light mushrooms” from Brazil Who needs candlelit dinners with a few of these tossed into the salad?
And, sorry, but back to the horror stories, how about the Darwin’s bark spider that can spin a web across 25 m of water. Definitely wouldn’t want to be kayaking down this river in the dark – unless, of you course, you’d remembered to pack a sack of glow-in-the-dark mushrooms to light your way… Ah, nature, how you continue to astound us, “flaming out,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “like shining from shook foil.” And, according to the experts at IISE, more wonders await: an estimated 10 million species of plants and animals on this planet have yet to be described, named and classified.
