Twitter is a great source of information with 330 million monthly active users regularly posting their real-life observations on the microblogging website. While you might generally expect a piece of news or a viral thread on the platform, recent occurrences have propelled it to much higher status - a source of discovery of new species!
A new species of a parasitic fungus has been discovered through Twitter recently. The one-of-a-kind event occurred when Ana Sofia Reboleira, a biologist from the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark, came across a photo of a millipede posted on Twitter by Derek Hennen, a doctoral student at Virginia Tech.?
Reboleira found the image of the millipede to be quite peculiar. She spotted some dots on the millipede¡¯s head and claimed that it looked like fungi on top of the millipede. Never before had a fungi been found on American millipedes.
Hennen shared the image in 2018, as a part of a collection of millipede photos posted by him on Twitter. Reboleira discovered the image and having been intrigued by it, went on a hunt for the species in previously undocumented fungus. For this, she went through American millipede specimens conserved at the Natural History Museum.
Reboleira was able to confirm the existence of a previously unknown species that came from the family of Laboulbeniales. The Laboulbeniales include over 2000 species of obligate insect ectoparasites, that feed on insects, mites and millipedes. The microfungi is very different from anything observed before. While most of the fungi have long branching structures, the newly discovered species has a cellular thalli.
Upon its discovery, the researchers responsible named the species ¡®Troglomyces twitteri¡¯, after the microblogging website where it was first discovered. The findings of the study are now published in the journal MycoKeys.
This is a first-of-its-kind discovery through any of the social media platforms. The occurrence shows just how such platforms enable researchers to share and complement each other¡¯s work and bridge the gaps formed by the physical world. With a live example amongst us now, only more of such sharing practices can be expected from the world of science!