IN THE RED SEA DISCOVERED A NEW SPECIES OF THE LUMINOUS POLYPS

IN THE RED SEA DISCOVERED A NEW SPECIES OF THE LUMINOUS POLYPS

Author: Antonenko Andrei – from internet editions of "World of Wildlife", 2016

An international team of biologists, which included scientists from the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, opened the Red Sea, on the reef Farasan Archipelago (Saudi Arabia), a new species fluorescent polyps living in the shells of shellfish, and collected his DNA samples. Article about it, published in the journal PLoS One, tells the press release of the Moscow University.

Opened animals are miniature hydroid polyps, or hydroids (being reminiscent of the hydras a school textbook, which fall to them relatively close relatives) with a body length of about 1.5 millimeters. They live in colonies, like garlands on the shells of shellfish species Nassarius margaritifer, body length reaches 20-35 millimeters.

These newly opened being related, appears to be to genus Cytaeis, are capable of fluorescence. And the lights are not their whole body, but only a part of the perioral. Apparently, this device serves to attract prey into the mouth of the animal, which he draws from the water - plankton. At night, when the glow can be seen mollusks on which "apartments" polyps just crawl out of the sand on the surface of the bottom to hunt for other invertebrates.

For scientists also it is convenient beca

use other closely related species polyps fluoresce other areas of the body, and thus it is possible to distinguish between them.

"Comparison of fluorescence hydroid found in the Red Sea, with that of other hydroids of this kind, as well as the study of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of this hydroid and analysis presented in the genetic bank, allowed to point out the existence of the species specificity of fluorescence in morphologically indistinguishable species of hydroids Cytaeis. Thus, the example of hydroids first demonstrated the ability to use features of the localization of the fluorescence to determine the appearance of similar invertebrate animals ", - said Vyacheslav Ivanenko, a leading researcher of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology, Moscow State University and one of the study's authors.

Zoologists formulated a several interesting questions. For example, how undetected polyps "choosy" in choosing a clam-host? In addition, fluorescence in hydroids generally poorly studied, so that the coming new research in this area.