"Inching through the beam of light, an alien creature crawled across the surface of the sand, resembling an inch-long cluster of ghostly leaves fringed with silvery filigree and capped with a pair of antennae-like stalks. "It immediately caught my eye," said Gosliner, Invertebrate Zoology Curator for the California Academy of Sciences. "I've been diving there for 30 years ... and this one immediately struck me as different.""
"So Gosliner and his colleagues photographed the animal, collected and carefully examined samples and tested its DNA to reveal the strange specimen was a sea slug species dubbed Cyerce Basi, which had never before been documented. Along with tiny sea slugs, elegant birds and strange, fuzzy flowers, the marine oddity is just one of 72 species of plants, animals and fungi discovered by researchers at the California Academy of Sciences last year. "Describing (a species) is the very first step to being able to conserve it. If you don't know it's there, if you don't know what it is, it's hard to worry about it," said Steven Beissinger, a professor emeritus of ecology and conservation biology at UC Berkeley who was not involved in the studies. "These kinds of studies are important - they're not the end of the story, they're the start of the story.""
A night dive in the Philippines yielded an unrecorded sea slug, Cyerce Basi, discovered when a researcher photographed, sampled, and DNA-tested the specimen. Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences documented 72 new species across plants, animals, and fungi, including tiny sea slugs, birds, and unusual flowers from both distant regions and nearby locales. Each new organism expands scientific knowledge and reveals vast remaining biodiversity. Species description enables conservation planning by establishing existence and identity. Scientists emphasize that documenting species initiates conservation efforts rather than completing them.
Read at The Mercury News
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