A new species of mud dragon has been discovered by a research team led by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
The animal was found in the South Orkney Trench in the Southern Ocean at a depth of about 6,000 meters.
Kinorhynchs are small animals – measuring between 100 micrometres and one millimetre – that are part of the meiofauna, a very important animal community for the proper functioning of marine ecosystems.
“This discovery significantly expands the knowledge of the biodiversity of these animals in hadal environments, those over 6,000 meters, adding to a very small group of species known at these depths,” says Alberto Gonzalez Casarrubios, a researcher in the Department of Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution at the UCM.
A new species: Echionderes australis sp. nov.
The study, published in the journal ‘Zoologischer Anzeiger‘ and led by Nuria Sanchez, professor at the UCM, not only describes a new species (‘Echionderes australis sp. nov.‘), but does so from a very little explored environment, due to the technical difficulty involved.
To date, only two species of kinorhynchs were known from hadal zones, so with this new species, knowledge of this group in these particular environments is increased by 33%.
The sampling was carried out in December 2019 during the KH-19-6_leg4 oceanographic cruise on board the Japanese oceanographic vessel R/V Hakuho-Maru.
The kinorhynchs were separated by hand under a binocular microscope at the University of Southern Denmark during an Erasmus+ stay by Marta Garcia-Cobo, a researcher at the UCM.
For identification and analysis, light microscopy (LM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used with interactive keys and specialized literature to identify and describe the new species.