• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Brand New Species Of Delightful Sea Creature Discovered Off The British Coast

March 1, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Finding a new species can happen in all sorts of different ways from reclassifying species based on new genetic information with a little help from Will Smith, finding them hiding in the trees, or spending months looking closely at museum specimens. Scientists are always learning more about the animal species that surround us. Now a new species of sea slug has been discovered in British waters almost by accident. 

Scientists from the UK’s Centre for Environment, Food and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) and the University of Cadiz in Spain collected 14 specimens while doing routine surveys of fisheries off the southwest coast of England and one in the Gulf of Cadiz. Over 100 species of sea slugs are known to live in British waters but this one had something a little bit unusual. 

Advertisement

The new species, described as “cream and clay-colored with white specks”, has been named Pleurobranchaea britannica and is around 2-5 centimeters (0.7-1.9 inches) long. Initially, because of the distinctive side gill on the right side of the creature, researchers thought it might be another species of Pleurobranchaea meckeli, which is typically found in Senegal. However, this species has never been seen before in UK waters leading scientists to start to question the true identity of the sample they had collected.

“It is exciting to see that routine fisheries surveys can still lead to such discoveries. It only took a brief inspection of two specimens to be confident that we had stumbled upon a species of Pleurobranchaea. This was thrilling because no other species from this genus had been documented in UK waters, or even this far north,” said Ross Bullimore, a marine ecologist at Cefas and co-author of the paper describing the sea slug, in a statement sent to IFLScience.

Eventually, the specimens were sent to a team in Spain where the researchers looked closely at both the DNA and compared the structures to that of known species. They concluded that the specimen was a brand new species. 

Top down view of the new sea slug. The animal has opaque white specks across most of its body with some brown coloration.

This new species increases the number of sea slugs in the Pleurobranchaea genus to three.

Image Courtesy of Ross Bullimore ©

Sea slugs are one of the most brightly colored and diverse groups of animals with some displaying incredible features and unique appearance. They also can take on parts of their prey, either repurposing cells for photosynthesis or becoming toxic by consuming toxic animals.  

Advertisement

“When Cefas scientists contacted me and told me that they had collected individuals belonging to the sea slug genus Pleurobranchaea, but whose specific identity was not clear, I was really surprised,” said Dr Juan Lucas Cervera Currado of the University of Cadiz. “Firstly, because species from this genus have never been found in the British Isles, and secondly because the possibility of having found a new species of this genus in European waters was really exciting.” 

Pluerobranchea are commonly known as side-gilled sea slugs, their gills situated on the right side of the body, allowing them to extract oxygen from the water. No other groups of sea slugs found in UK waters have this anatomy so the distinct leaf-like – or “canoe paddle” structure as the team describes it – side gill alerted them to the fact they had found something not found in UK waters before. 

They suggest it could have a range as far south as Spain and even off the coast of Portugal. The two other species in the genus include Pleurobranchaea meckeli and Pleurobranchaea morosa. The first lives in the Mediterranean Sea and can even be found off Senegal. The second is much rarer and less well-known. However, this is not good news as the researchers suggest that climate change could be making this species move into more northerly waters as the temperatures increase.

The team is thrilled though to have discovered a brand new sea slug species. “There is often an assumption that we know everything there is to know about species found in UK waters, but this just goes to show that there is still so much to learn in our own backyard,” said Bullimore. 

Advertisement

The study is published in Zoosystematics and Evolution.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-NZ players reach Dubai after ‘specific, credible threat’ derailed Pakistan tour
  2. Wall Street tumbles as rising Treasury yields sink Big Tech
  3. What Is An H Bomb?
  4. Snowball Earth: Our Planet’s Greatest Ice Age Probably Didn’t Have Single Cause

Source Link: Brand New Species Of Delightful Sea Creature Discovered Off The British Coast

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • How Old Is The Solar System? (And How Can We Tell?)
  • Next Week, A Record-Breaking Over 7 Billion People Will See The Total Lunar Eclipse
  • The Goblin Shark Has The Fastest Jaws In The Ocean, Firing Like A Slingshot At Speeds Of 3.1-Meters-Per-Second
  • We Thought Geological Boundaries Were Random. Now, A New Study Has Identified Hidden Patterns
  • Do Fish Sleep?
  • The Biblical Flood Myth That Inspired Noah’s Ark Had A Sinister Twist
  • Massive Review Of 19 Autism Therapies Finds No Strong Evidence And Lack Of Safety Data
  • Giant City-Swallowing Cracks In Earth’s Surface Are A “New Geo-Hydrological Hazard”
  • Three Incredible Telescopes Looked At The Butterfly Nebula To Learn Where Earth Came From
  • The Pacific Ocean Is So Vast It Contains Its Own Antipodes
  • World’s Tallest Bridge Over “Crack In The Earth” Gets Daunting Load Test By Fleet Of 96 Trucks
  • Mars’s Interior Still Has Evidence Of Ancient Impact, Dead NASA Mission Tells Us
  • A Soviet Physicist Once Survived A Proton Beam Through The Head – This Is How
  • Outstanding Photos Show First Baby Planet Growing In The Grooves Of A Stellar Disk
  • The “Plague Of Justinian” May Have Been The First Pandemic. DNA At A Mass Grave Has Finally Identified Its Cause.
  • Michelson And Morley’s “Failed” 1887 Experiment Changed The Course Of Physics, And Put The Aether To Bed
  • Only 19 US States Require School Sex Education To Be Medically Accurate, Finds Sweeping Review
  • Do Any Frogs Or Toads Give Birth To Live Young? Just One: Meet The Western Nimba Toad
  • Tasmanian Tigers’ Genetics May Have Doomed Them Long Before Humans Came Along
  • Scientists “Wake Up” Ancient Life That’s Been Under The Seabed For 100 Million Years
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version