57 new species from one Argentine submarine canyon
This one made me smile: a single two-week workshop in Buenos Aires turned a pile of deep-sea samples into 57 species and five genera that nobody had described before.
Back in July, twenty taxonomists and early-career researchers from Latin America and Europe got together at Universidad Maimónides. The workshop was run by the Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census together with Schmidt Ocean Institute, CONICET and Argentina's natural sciences museum. Most of the material came from Schmidt Ocean Institute's 2025 expedition to the Mar del Plata Canyon, where the ROV SuBastian collected animals from the research vessel Falkor (too), plus some older CONICET samples.
The count breaks down like this: 20 copepods, 22 echinoderms (sea cucumbers and crinoids), 14 cnidarians such as octocorals, sea pens and stony corals, and one tusk-shell mollusc.
My favourite is a horned sea cucumber of the genus Peniagone, nicknamed "Loki", found at 2,577 metres. It is one of up to ten new sea cucumbers from the haul. And the detail that really stuck with me: only about 10% of the copepod samples have been looked at so far, and every single one turned out to be new.
Some of the corals might even be new genera or a new family once the genetic work is done. The specimens stay in Argentina's national collections, and the confirmed species will go into the open Ocean Census database. Honestly, it is a good reminder of how little of the deep sea we have actually catalogued.
Source: DIVE Magazine
Back in July, twenty taxonomists and early-career researchers from Latin America and Europe got together at Universidad Maimónides. The workshop was run by the Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census together with Schmidt Ocean Institute, CONICET and Argentina's natural sciences museum. Most of the material came from Schmidt Ocean Institute's 2025 expedition to the Mar del Plata Canyon, where the ROV SuBastian collected animals from the research vessel Falkor (too), plus some older CONICET samples.
The count breaks down like this: 20 copepods, 22 echinoderms (sea cucumbers and crinoids), 14 cnidarians such as octocorals, sea pens and stony corals, and one tusk-shell mollusc.
My favourite is a horned sea cucumber of the genus Peniagone, nicknamed "Loki", found at 2,577 metres. It is one of up to ten new sea cucumbers from the haul. And the detail that really stuck with me: only about 10% of the copepod samples have been looked at so far, and every single one turned out to be new.
Some of the corals might even be new genera or a new family once the genetic work is done. The specimens stay in Argentina's national collections, and the confirmed species will go into the open Ocean Census database. Honestly, it is a good reminder of how little of the deep sea we have actually catalogued.
Source: DIVE Magazine
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