Found squirming deep under the soil, the Los Angeles thread millipede is proof of the incredible biodiversity hiding beneath our feet.
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. It’s just the third known species in this genus, a group of millipedes that stands out for their subterranean lifestyles and isolation from relatives.“looks like somebody plucked a thread out of their shirt,” says Paul Marek, a millipede biologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Naturalists Cedric Lee, of the University of California, Berkeley, and James Bailey discovered the millipede on a slug-finding expedition in Lake Forest, Calif., in 2018. While hunting for gelatinous gastropods, they stumbled upon a millipede unlike any they’d seen before. The duo uploaded a record of their find to iNaturalist, an app that lets users share photos of organisms they find with others, and identified the specimen as a member of the Siphonophoridae family..
During a visit to California over Christmas, Marek went to Lake Forest to look for more millipedes. “We collected around 10 individuals to get a good understanding of the variation” in what the critter looks like, he says. He then studied the males’ gonopods — sperm transfer organs that evolved from leg segments — to see if they matched any known species. “They were distinct,” Marek says. Genome sequencing confirmed that the Los Angeles millipedes are a newfound species.
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