Fisherman pulls in nets covered with ‘fairy floss’ – and discovers a new species
A commercial fisherman working off the coast of Australia pulled in his nets on a normal day in 2018, and saw something he had never seen before.
“It was … almost like a fairy floss, floating in the water and sticking to the nets. It’s very hard to describe, but they coated the nets,” he told ABC Gippsland on May 22. “I thought, ‘What the heck is this’?”
He took a closer look, using his phone camera to zoom in on the stringy, pink creatures wrapped around the line of his net.
There, he saw tiny shrimp.
He decided to get an expert opinion to help identify them and saved some of the specimens to be sent to the Australian Museum Research Institute, according to a May 8 news release.
When researchers took a closer look at the floating little creatures, they realized they were not like any shrimp they had seen before.
Skeleton shrimp, part of the family Caprelloidea, are a type of crustacean that have a distinctive body shape compared to other known shrimp, according to the release. They feed on phytoplankton and other material suspended in the ocean’s current.
They were originally discovered off the coast of Japan in 1890, but when the Australian researchers compared what the fisherman had found to what they already knew to exist, there were clear differences.
“Results from the study found consistent morphological differences between the Australian and Japanese samples,” the researchers said in the release. “Crucially, specimens from Japan which were twice the size of those from Australia had fewer segments in the first pair of antenna – this is unusual, because if they were the same species it would be expected that they would have more segments, as these appendages in caprellids have been shown to increase by one or two segments every time the individuals (molt) their exoskeleton as they mature.”
The differences between the two samples confirmed what the researchers believed – this was a new species.
“The new find from the Gippsland Lakes is exciting because it’s a native species, highlighting how much there is to discover in our marine waters, even in areas we think are well known,” researcher Shane Ahyong told ABC Gippsland.
The researchers also used the samples taken by the fisherman to reclassify another species, highlighting the key parts of the animal that make it unique.
The fisherman told ABC Gippsland that he had been fishing for more than 20 years but had never seen anything like these shrimp and was “quite chuffed” to be part of the scientific discovery.
The Gippsland Lakes, where the shrimp were found, are on the southern coast of Australia in Victoria.
This story was originally published May 23, 2023 at 1:29 PM with the headline "Fisherman pulls in nets covered with ‘fairy floss’ – and discovers a new species."
