7 New Species Discovered in Cities

[Music] scientists are discovering and describing new species all the time and there are probably millions of creatures on earth still waiting to be found there's no doubt that some of them are lurking at the bottom of the ocean or deep in jungles but a lot of them might be closer to home in our city better DNA analysis techniques and new attention to urban habitats are revealing more biodiversity from Los Angeles backyards to the feet of the Statue of Liberty these new species are usually small or look a lot like other animals so they tend to go unnoticed in some of the busiest places in the world here are seven of them if you are looking for new species in Brazil you might think to start in the Amazon rainforest not in Sao Paulo the most populous city in the southern hemisphere but that's exactly where a 2014 biological survey of mollusks turned up a never-before-seen land snail in the woods of the city's Brule Marx park it's a little bigger than other species in its genus and can have light beige shells instead of pure white but snails are also identified by the walls on their shells those characteristic spirals which are consistent across a species so it was the little details that set the SAP hollow snail apart the tiny proto shells of newly hatched babies had one-and-a-half worls instead of two unlike other members of the snail genus plus there are 16 little ridges called threads on the topmost world in adults instead of over 20 the researchers picked its scientific name otto lipoma palace stannum based on the word palace tano or someone born in the city of sao paulo and they speculate that the park is just a fragment of native rainforest where the tiny snail was able to survive even as its habitat was mostly replaced with city scape on the other side of the southern hemisphere in 2015 a pair of naturalist stumbled across three new millipede species in a city park in Launceston Tasmania it can be tough to tell apart small arthropods so one way is by examining the shape of their genitals the shape differ between species so that individuals can only mate with their own kind when the discoverers brought these millipedes to an insect scientist or entomologist one stood out because of the projections on the male's genitalia that apparently looked like the head of a jackal so they named it Tasmania Souma Anubis after the ancient Egyptian jackal god T Anubis is common in the twelve square kilometers of the city's parks and nature reserves but it's missing from the eucalyptus woodlands right outside town the entomologist speculates that this millipede could have been widespread before the forests were damaged by sheep grazing and cleared for development like the so Paolo snail this jackal junked millipede seems to have found refuge in a patch of nature surrounded by city in 2011 entomologists published the results of a survey of the bees of New York City and its suburbs with descriptions of many species including a brand new species of sweat be collected in 2009 in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden but here's the thing all of the bees aren't really new they could have been there before New York City was even New Amsterdam and stuck around after the city was built chances are scientists had even stumbled across some of these species without actually knowing they were different insect sweat bees are about the size of a grain of rice and so similar that you usually need genetic information to tell them apart and a new technology called DNA barcoding does just that this technique uses short DNA sequences that are part of the mitochondrial genome and gets passed down by females and usually differs between species so with a tiny tissue sample and an ever-growing database of barcode sequences scientists can quickly identify loss of specimen the botanic garden be named lasya glossing Gotham after its city home was actually one of four New York species that the survey turned up el Gotham hasn't made an appearance in a Batman movie yet but if the Caped Crusader ever needs a tiny insect sidekick he knows who to call New York City has been harboring some bigger animals to scientists who study reptiles and amphibians called herpetologists had suspected that something was odd about some of the Big Apple's leopard frogs for a while in 1937 an ecologist named Karl Caulfield noticed that some of the leopard frogs sounded like they had shorter and chirpy ur calls than the two known species he suggested in a paper that maybe there was a third undescribed species lurking in the city's ponds but the idea didn't have enough evidence to catch on at least until 2014 when a team of scientists thoroughly studied some of the squeaky sounding frogs and published a paper they first caught these leopard frogs on Staten Island in 2008 only 10 miles from the feet of the Statue of Liberty and realized they were something unique though they were discovered in New York City call recordings suggest this species can be found from Connecticut to North Carolina upon closer inspection these amphibians had minor physical differences from other leopard frog their vocal sacs were a bit bigger and their leg colors were a bit darker but the defining evidence was genetic the herpetologist sequence several sections of their mitochondrial DNA and some nuclear genes so they confirmed that this leopard frog was a unique species and dubbed it Roenick awful died after the man who first proposed that it existed like the New York scientists puzzling over frogs biologists thought there might be something weird about the bottlenose dolphins near Melbourne Australia over the years they were lumped in with species in the genus tur co-op scientists chalked up any physical variations to differences between males and females from skull shape and a stubbier nose to a unique color pattern in 2011 though marine biologists settled the matter once and for all with some genetic analysis they examined the Dolphins mitochondrial DNA plus repeating sequences of nucleotides many micro satellites don't usually code for proteins so they mutate more often than other parts of the genome making them useful in identifying different species so these tests revealed that the 100 or so dolphins living beneath Melbourne skyscrapers were an entirely different species the scientists named them tercios Australis or the burn-in dolphin after an Aboriginal phrase that basically means porpoise the only other known population is even smaller around 50 dolphins that live in a network of coastal salt water lakes about 100 miles away since there are so few of them they're really vulnerable to human threats like our pollution so the biologists that identified them are advocating for the protection under Australia's endangered species laws now if discovering and describing one new species sounds impressive imagine finding 30 I'm talking about flies see the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles started a project called bioscan in 2013 where entomologists worked with Los Angeles homeowners to put insect trapping tents in their backyards for science the researchers at the Museum have been collecting and studying all these insects to learn more about the biodiversity of the area and as of 2015 they found and described 30 previously unknown fly species all from a family called the forehead flies these humpback insects about the same size as fruit fly just like with millipedes fly species genitals can be really distinct even when the rest of their bodies look pretty much the same so the researchers identified most of these new species using careful examination with microscopes and all but one of them were named for the citizen scientists that hosted the insect trapping tents where they were found even though we tend to think flies are annoying they play important roles in the ecosystem preying on insect pests eating organic jump by monitoring their populations plus those of other insects scientists can learn more about how this urban ecosystem is changing over time most of these species we've talked about we're probably there before us humans in our huge buildings but can organization cause new species to evolve take the so called Kai wolf a hybrid animal that's part coyote wolf and domestic dog Kai wolves aren't a recognized species right now because really they're just Eastern coyotes with some of their DNA mixed in but some people believe they could be headed that way coyotes are native to western North America and have been gradually expanding eastward since the 1800s as native predators disappeared in forests were clear there they started to encounter the remnants of Eastern wolf populations and even domestic dogs and occasionally these animals interbred unlike sterile mules produced by horse and donkey mating pairs these species are biologically similar enough that the hybrid eastern coyotes are fertile in the last decade scientists have started to analyze eastern coyote DNA especially using variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms or snips which can reveal genetic links between different animals a paper published in 2013 for example studied around 430 of these critters and found that they shared 30% of their DNA with wolves and 10% with dogs behaviorally they're also a hybrid and seemed to be more suited to urban environments than Western coyotes or wolves unlike scrappy solitary coyotes they hunt in small teams but they're smaller than wolves and don't mind living near people meaning that can survive in lots of habitats so are these eastern coyotes really the beginning of a new species for now they're not but if these animals become more genetically distinct over time then biologists might give them the new species stamp of approval and Chi wolves will be more than just a nickname for these hybrids around the world habitat loss is a major threat to wildlife just because some animals can live in densely populated urban areas doesn't mean it's actually the best thing for that still these seven species show that we're just beginning to appreciate the biodiversity in cities who knows there could even be some new species hiding in your own backyard thanks for watching this episode of scishow and thank you to our patrons on patreon who help us keep making episodes like this if you want to help support us and get some cool rewards while you're at it just go to patreon.com/scishow and if you just want to keep getting smarter with us go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe Hedren there's probably hundreds more around the corner it hardly seems fair when there are only a few thousand tigers in the whole world but how can so many of certain

Channel: SciShow

Views: 789,711

Rating: 4.9298429 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, snail, sao paulo, shell, paulistano, anubis, millipede, entomology, arthropod, molluscs, bee, new york, tasmania, dna, genome, batman, gotham, frog, leopard frog, michael aranda, aranda, amphibian, herpetology, biology, animal, species, melbourne, dolphin, australia, mammal, ocean, fly, insect, los angeles, bioscan, coywolf, coyote, wolf, city, urban, life

Id: YrmT-Re02QU

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2016