Despite residing in the entertainment capital of the world, the Los Angeles thread millipede has managed to stay out of the spotlight. However, when scientists discovered it, they knew they had found a creature deserving of attention.
I. socal “looks like somebody plucked a thread out of their shirt,” says Paul Marek, a millipede biologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Naturalists Cedric Lee, from the University of California, Berkeley, and James Bailey stumbled upon the millipede during a slug-finding expedition in Lake Forest, Calif., in 2018. While searching for gelatinous gastropods, they came across a millipede unlike any they had seen before. The duo documented their discovery on iNaturalist, an app that allows users to share photos of organisms they encounter with others, and identified the specimen as a member of the Siphonophoridae family.
Marek, who is also an avid iNaturalist user, had set up alerts for these types of creatures (SN: 12/21/21). The finding sparked his interest because the only other known locations of this family in California are hundreds of kilometers north of Los Angeles. Lake Forest is approximately 80 kilometers (50 miles) southeast of the city. So Marek joined forces with Lee and Bailey to unravel the mystery of this myriapod.
2023-08-01 07:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org
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