New Discoveries: A Dwarf Lemur and Pop Star Shrimp

Welcome to our series highlighting new species discoveries. A written collaboration from Stanford and Academy scientists and staff, this post appears on the second and forth Wednesday every month.

Islands and oceans are often hotspots of diversity. In this week’s post, we highlight a new lemur discovered on an island near Madagascar, where many primates are threatened, and a new crustacean found on Pacific coral reefs.

New Dwarf Lemur?

In April, conservation researcher Charlie Gardner and his wife were vacationing in Nosy Hara, a small island off the northwest tip of Madagascar. During early mornings and evenings, the couple walked the forest and encountered a very tame, very small lemur. This finding, believed to be a new species of dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus), was published last month in the journal Primates.

The lemur is small even for a dwarf species. Gardner and wife Louise Jasper attribute that—and its friendly nature—to life on the island. “The apparent small size and predator naïveté of the animals we observed suggest that the Cheirogaleus population on Nosy Hara has been isolated from mainland populations over significant evolutionary time,” they write. Its nearest relative appears to be on the mainland of Madagascar, 25 kilometers to the southeast, though a full exploration and description of this potential new species are still needed.

Shrimp-like Elton John

Some new species have all the luck! Good or bad, depending on your taste. A new amphipod (small crustacean) has been named after Elton John. Leucothoe eltoni happily lives among other coral reef animals in the Philippines and Indonesia, but in the Hawaiian Islands is an established invasive species—the small crustacean likely hitched a ride to Pearl Harbor aboard a U.S. Naval ship in the 1990s.

Scientist James Darwin Thomas was inspired by the animal’s large gnathopod—a claw appendage on male amphipods likely used to grasp its partner during mating, according to Brittanica. It reminded him of Elton John’s boots in the movie Tommy. The new small find, less than a centimeter (about a third of an inch) long, was described last month in Zookeys.

What other new musical species lie hidden—or in plain sight—for researchers and citizen scientists to discover? Check back on September 23 for our next New Discoveries post.

Rob Jackson is a professor of earth sciences at Stanford University. He travels the world for his job, from the rainforests of Peru to the deserts of South Africa and Patagonia.

Image(s): Elton John shrimp, J. Thomas/Zookeys; Dwarf lemur, Louise Jasper/Primates