A New Millipede Species Honoring Community Scientist B.J. Stacey

A little bit of the Pacific Northwest makes it all the way down to San Diego County. Up on top of the Peninsular Range peaks you can find representatives of many of the critters I grew up with in the Cascade foothills of western Washington. Places with ferns and fir trees, plethodontid salamanders, Brown Creepers, Pristiloma microsnails, and Hesperonemastoma harvestmen — Mount Palomar is a good example. In 2016 on Mount Palomar I found a juvenile millipede in the family Striariidae, which at the time was the southernmost record for the order Chordeumatida in western North America. It was very likely an undescribed species, but adult males are needed to test such hypotheses, for as with the majority of millipedes, the shape of the male’s genitalia is key for identifying and describing species. The next rainy season I returned to look for adults. These excursions ended up being a rendezvouses of community scientists, most of us familiar with each other on iNaturalist, but meeting each other in person for the first time. On 12 February, Darwin’s birthday, we had our first success. We found the adults, as well as juveniles of two different genera in the Chordeumatida! With biodiversity, there is always a reason to return. Following the tried-and-true process since the days of log-flipping in western Washington with Bill Leonard, I shipped these specimens to millipede expert Dr. Bill Shear in Virginia. As predicted, and reported in the new publication out today, this was a new to science species of Amplaria. Dr. Shear was kind enough to grant me a request: to name this species after my friend and co-collector, the prolific community scientist BJ Stacey.

New millipede species Amplaria staceyi, Shear 2021, from the type locality on Palomar Mountain, Charles Darwin’s birthday 2017. Image by B.J. Stacey, iNaturalist observation 5113690.

BJ Stacey joined me on every trip to Palomar, he collected specimens and took many images (such as the one above). As a community scientists he has made numerous important contributions, including the discovery of an important frog populations of conservation concern. He has formally presented on community science to the San Diego Natural History Museum and the San Diego State University Natural History Club. As of this writing, his iNaturalist profile reports that he has made 89,613 observations and identified 74,056 observations of others. The paper describing the new species can be found here, in the journal Zootaxa, though it is not open access.

Distance and distancing have kept us from spending as much time in the field as we used to, but BJ and I continue to collaborate on community science research including on the Molluscan Mycophagy project, and on the development of a community science challenge: The 1,000 Species Yard List. Stay tuned!

I hope you like your new species BJ, surely it is the most handsome of the Amplaria!

BJ Stacey and Jay Keller looking for millipedes on Mount Palomar, 12 February 2017.

Gosodesmine — a New Chemical Discovered from the Biodiversity Reference Library

The solution to many problems can be found within the repository of the Biodiversity Reference Library. Most of these solutions are hidden through ignorance and the vastness of diversity, and many problems haven’t yet manifested, but we must protect and preserve all that we can, and explore fervently.

Millipedes are well-known for their chemical defense compounds. A 425 million year old fossil millipede from the Scottish island of Kerrera is the oldest known terrestrial animal, and early Carboniferous fossils (about 350 million years ago) preserve ozopores, the laterally paired openings from which exude millipede chemical secretions. Thus, some of the earliest terrestrial interactions were of millipede predation and defense. Over the intervening hundreds of millions of years, millipedes have diversified to endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful — so too have their chemical defenses evolved to a diverse array of compounds and cocktails that we have only begun to explore. A recent paper in the Journal of Natural Products furthers our understanding of millipede defenses with the description of Gosodesmine, an alkaloid with terpene characters that is structurally similar to pumiliotoxins (think poison dart frogs) and is likely quite toxic.

Gosodesmine was described and named from the millipede (Gosodesmus claremontus), which is widespread within, yet apparently endemic to California. They are blind, long slender pinkish millipedes, that consume fungus and are typically found on large woody oak debris. These aggregations may benefit individuals with the low cost of producing small amounts of defensive secretions by each group member. Also, the youngest juveniles are not know to produce chemical defenses, thus being in a multi-generational cluster confers obvious advantages to the youngest broods.

Gosodesmus claremontus from near Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, image by Marshal Hedin.

Humans are good inventors, but we should be humbled by the adaptations produced by Mother Nature and natural selection. The Value of Biodiversity is endless: medicine, food and crop varieties, materials such as wood and cotton, ecosystem services such as crop pollination and water purification, recreation such as bird watching and hunting and from these grow an economy, resources for biotechnology, robotics, and engineering, etc. Biodiversity helps us understand the history of our planet and put our present in context. Biodiversity is beautiful. Some millipede defensive secretions have shown promise as an insect and arachnid repellent, some have shown to be effective antimicrobial agents. Maybe these chemicals will find uses in pharmacology or biotechnology. In the words of E.O. Wilson, “We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.”

Seven New Genera and 33 New Species of Millipedes Described From the Pacific Northwest

Millipedes are among the oldest known terrestrial critters known to have creeped about the landscape. They are important nutrient cyclers, detritivores of leaf litter and woody debris. Millipedes have no venom, they don’t sting, I’ve never known them to bite. Instead, most millipedes rely on a cocktail of defensive secretions to keep them safe as they graze among the decomposing forest floor. They like cool and damp environments with plenty of forest litter, so it comes as no surprise that they are abundant and biodiverse in the temperate rain-forests of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the North America. A recent paper in Zootaxa describes 33 new species and seven new genera of millipedes from the PNW in the family Conotylidae. These millipedes are all small (about 1.5 cm), and are superficially similar looking — the species are primarily differentiated by the size of their hair-baring “shoulders” (metazonital dorsolateral paranota) and the male genitalia (modified legs called gonopods).

The new species and genera described in this paper are primarily from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, but also from California, Nevada, Montana, and in Canada from British Columbia and Alberta. Some of the new species honor local conservation heroes like Kristiina Ovaska (Ovaskella ovaskae, new genus and species), William Leonard (Bollmanella leonardi), and Robert Michael Pyle (Loomisiella pylei). Other species are named from the localities where they were collected, such as Loomisiella evergreen whose type locality is designated The Evergreen State College (Go Geoducks!), Bifurcatella olympiana, named after the city from which many records of this species are known, and Bifurcatella hobo, named for one of my favorite places on earth — Hobo Cedar Grove Botanical Area in northern Idaho.

A conotylid species, likely Complicatella complicata, from Priest Point Park, Olympia, Washington. Image by William P. Leonard, used here with permission.

I started looking for litter-dwellers in 2003 with Bill Leonard. We sent our millipedes to (who were then) the only millipede experts in North America, William Shear and Rowland Shelley (1942-2018). This collaboration was and continues to be a great success, resulting in  the description of the new family Microlympiidae, the first North American record for the family Anthroleucosomatidae with the new genus and species Leschius mccallisteri, and many other new genera and species that resulted in both patronyms and authorships for Leonard and myself. This collaboration and the friendships that formed over millipede species discovery is also commemorated in this recent paper, by the species Taiyutyla amicitia — amicita meaning “friendship”. Through our work, the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest have become recognized as a hot spot for millipede biodiversity. Many more species await description, and many more likely await discovery.