Ana Santana
Santa Cruz De Tenerife (EFE) Three of them will pay homage to the Cape Verdean basketball player Edy Tavares, the author of the “Historia del pueblo guanche” and TVE.
And the fourth also corresponds to a new genus for Cape Verde, where it was collected on the shallow rocky coast of the islands of Sal and Boavista, and has been named “Janssonius voluntarius”, in honor of the first known cartographer and volunteering in recognition of the success of its intervention in the recovery of sea turtles in said archipelago.
The authors of the discovery are Jesús Ortea, from the University of Oviedo, and Leopoldo Moro, from the Biodiversity Service of the Government of the Canary Islands, who explained in an interview with EFE that the species “Stiliger tve” and “Stiliger tve” have also been described in Cape Verde. Mirpurina edytavares”, while “Mourgona bethencourti” has been found in puddles in Gran Canaria and Tenerife.
The findings have been published in the tropical biodiversity magazine “Avicennia” and Leopoldo Moro stresses that “Mourgona bethencourti”, found in the rocky intertidal with green algae of San Miguel de Abona (Tenerife) and Punta de Pasito Blanco (Gran Canaria) , is a unique species collected only twice over 40 years of sampling, which initially led to its being confused with another sea slug.
It is “an incredible herbivorous slug, a green pom-pom eater with body architecture designed not to be seen” and the body papillae “look like fans filled by the digestive gland, they can be regenerated when you autonomize them and they may have the gift of kleptoplasty to carry out photosynthesis when their habitat becomes hostile to them”.
From now on it will bear the name “Mourgona bethencourti” in honor of Juan Bethencourt Alfonso, author of the “History of the Guanche people”.
However, biologists warn that collecting in the marine environment on a regular and continuous basis over time, which is the critical path for the discovery of new species, in the long run and with repeated sampling in the same habitats and by the same authors causes that “the inventory approaches its final point and each time the same effort is invested to obtain fewer results”.
“In Costa Rica, to correct the decline, we incorporated the figure of the parataxonomist into the inventory team, people from rural areas without any type of academic training who were instructed to collect with the tools and for their purposes, what they had to collect and how to do it to guarantee the sample” and the results “were extraordinary”, specifies Jesús Ortea.
In the case of the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, a nursery school teacher was incorporated into the collection strategy “who has generated the same results. She has sampled where no one else did, for the simple fact of doing it and without any discarding ”.
His prize has been to locate new species in habitats never sampled due to the previous prejudice of assuming that they could not provide results: the algae pompoms of the breakers at low tide, always moved and agitated by the oscillation of the waves, manifested themselves as a habitat with results unthinkable.
The first of them on the island of Boavista, with pompoms located from a drone flight in the immensity of Erbatao beach, and which contained “a new species as small as it was original” which it was decided to baptize as “Stiliger tve” for coincide his discovery with the 50th anniversary of the first color broadcast of TVE.
On that same island, in the pom-poms on the shore of the endless beaches of Sal Rei, “a new slug greeted us, a new genus for science, with some colors on its body that made the delay in finding it inexplicable,” the aforementioned “Janssonius voluntarius”.
The pompom habitat has another great advantage: it is easily accessible at any age and allows you to enjoy the pleasure of collecting “with the only risk of slipping on the puddles, but with the advantage of promoting an active old age,” says Jesús Ortea. .
And if the habitat of the pom-poms “provided us with surprising results, it was no less so that of the tide pools of the supralittoral of Cape Verde, where the water temperature can exceed thirty degrees during the hardest time of the day, where oxygen in the water it is scarce and only the most adapted survive”.
“It is in that habitat, which you have never gone to collect due to a supposed poverty of species, where Nature gives you a unique species of great beauty, a strange dream and you immediately think of dedicating it to an exemplary Cape Verdean, admired in his country in all age groups, the basketball player Edy Tavares”, exclaims Leopoldo Moro.
These results are part of the project “Monitoring, control and mitigation of proliferations of marine organisms associated with human disturbances and climate change in the Macaronesian region (MIMAR+)”, co-financed by Feder through the INTERREG VA MAC 2014-2020 Program, with the support from the Binter company. EFE