• 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

Worm “Lost” For 68 Years Has Been Photobombing Seahorses This Whole Time

November 13, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Science is no stranger to discovering species, losing them, and then rediscovering them again, but what’s less common is to realize that the animal you thought you’d misplaced is actually being photographed all the time. Such is the tale of the marine worm, Haplosyllis anthogorgicola, that’s been photobombing seahorses at a rate of three in every four pictures viewed by scientists in a recent study.

They’re pygmy seahorses, to be precise. Adorable, tiny, and oh-so photogenic, so it’s not surprising that citizen scientists have been snapping them across the central Indo-Pacific. What was surprising for the authors of a new study was to discover that when they looked very closely at these pictures, they could spot a worm hiding in plain sight that hadn’t been officially recorded since 1956.

Advertisement

In their paper, The Trojan seahorse: citizen science pictures of a seahorse harbour insights into the distribution and behaviour of a long-overlooked polychaete worm, they document how they spotted the elusive worm hiding in burrows on gorgonian corals. These corals are also a hotspot for pygmy seahorses, which is what gave them the idea to search through a rich portfolio of close-ups on the citizen scientist website, iNaturalist (the worm in this picture is on the seahorse’s neck).

“Upon examining those photographs, worms and their burrows were visible in the background, revealing that, despite being unrecorded since its description in 1956, the worm is actually widespread,” explained the authors in a release. “Hence, the charismatic seahorse secretly carried information on the lifestyle of this overlooked and unique worm.”

Haplosyllis anthogorgicola on coral, the worm is almost seethrough

To be fair to Waldo, it is easier to hide when you’re the consistency of glass noodles.

Image credit: Chloé Fourreau

Part of the reason the worms have gone unnoticed for so long likely comes down to their habitat of choice, which sits at around 15 to 40 meters (49 to 131 feet) below the sea surface, where the conditions are quite turbulent. Getting close enough to spot a miniature worm is therefore easier said than done, but photographs provide the opportunity to take a snapshot and dig into the details when you’re back on dry land, which is lovely and stationary.

The photos that revealed H. anthogorgicola’s great hiding spot have been on the site as far back as 2012, and they could be seen in three-quarters of all photos of pygmy seahorses viewed for the study. Studying the images has revealed new insights into the worms’ range, habitat, and behavior as it often looked like they were beefing with the seahorses, who may have been trying to eat them, or perhaps steal their food.

Advertisement

It just goes to show, then, that you don’t need to be a paid scientist to contribute to the rediscovery of lost species, and that citizen science sites like iNaturalist could have all manner of “lost” species hiding somewhere in the corner of other more conspicuous animals’ photos.

Forget Where’s Waldo, we have work to do.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings Of The Royal Society B.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. US stock futures lead Asia lower, dollar gains on yen
  2. Adding Gold To Wine Could Be The Key To Making It Taste Better
  3. A New Look At Some Old Fossils Has Just Rewritten The Story Of Human Evolution
  4. The Atlantic Gulf Stream Was Unexpectedly Strong During The Last Ice Age – New Study

Source Link: Worm "Lost" For 68 Years Has Been Photobombing Seahorses This Whole Time

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • How Do We Predict The Weather? Find Out More In Issue 40 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • You Should Never Leave These Foods In Your Fridge Door (But We Bet You Do)
  • These Gullies On Mars Look Carved – We Might Finally Know What Created Them
  • Potential Environmental Trigger For Autism Identified, 3I/ATLAS’s Tail Appears To Have Changed Direction, And Much More This Week
  • Spaghetti Has Inner Secrets We’re Only Just Learning About
  • How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English?
  • We Now Know How The First People Reached America – And It Wasn’t On Foot
  • Two Major Coral Species Now Functionally Extinct In Florida Keys, After Record-Breaking Marine Heatwave
  • A “Super-Earth” In The Habitable Zone Is Half The Distance To Comparable Worlds
  • Adorable But Critically Endangered Bornean Orangutan Born In Conservation Success
  • How Did The FDA Settle On The “2,000 Calories Per Day” Guideline?
  • Comet 3I/ATLAS Losing At Least Two Kangaroos’ Worth Of Dust Every Second
  • Mummified Dinosaur Duo Prove They Had Hooves, Marking “The First Confirmed Hooved Reptile”
  • What Do The Numbers On Your Toaster Really Mean?
  • NASA Vs. Elon Musk: Is A Moon Landing This Decade Off The Cards?
  • Scientists Explored Some Of The Deepest Parts Of The Ocean And Spotted Some Seriously Weird Deep-Sea Creatures
  • 500-Meter-Tall Megatsunami Struck Remote Alaskan Fjord After Massive Landslide
  • 3I/ATLAS, CKM Syndrome, And Mosquitoes’ Final Frontier
  • Male Humpback Dolphins Spotted Wearing Sea Sponge “Wigs” To Woo The Ladies
  • Can’t Sleep? The Military Sleep Trick That Helps You Fall Asleep in Just 2 Minutes
  • 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