NewCritters.com

CenSeam researchers Bertrand Richer de Forges and Philippe Bouchet found a new species of shrimp while trolling an undersea plateau in a remote area between Australia and New Caledonia.

If you know French you can read Richer de Forges’ paper, Découverte en mer du Corail d’une deuxième espèce de glyphéide (Crustacea, Decapoda, Glypheoidea) [pdf] otherwise you can visit CenSeam’s site where he talks about the discovery.

The new species was named Neoglyphea neocaledonica which means essentially means “new Glyphea of New Caledonia”.

The interesting thing about this new critter is that it is only the second Neoglyphea to be classified. Neoglyphea inopinata AKA the “fenix lobster” was first caught in 1906 and then stashed away in the Smithsonian Institute’s collection unidentified. It sat there waiting for over 60 years before it was rediscovered and classified by French scientists Forest and de Saint Laurent in 1975. Before that it was thought that ALL Glypheides were extinct as previously all species discoveries were from fossil samples.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Crustacea
Class: Malacostraca
Order: Decapoda
Suborder: Pleocyemata
Infraorder: Astacidea
Superfamily: Glypheoidea
Family: Glypheidae

FYI: CenSeam formed in 2005 and their mission is to do a Global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts. What’s a Seamount? An underwater mountain, of course! They are often hotspots for biodiversity and it is estimated that there are over 100,000 seamounts throughout the world’s oceans.

Location and information on New Caledonia