The creature is so small and so thin, that if you didn’t give it much notice, you may dismiss it as a bit of thread.
But examined under a microscope, the wriggling specimen with its 486 legs and translucent body represents a giant discovery to the trained eye.
You see, this isn’t just any old millipede. This is the Los Angeles thread millipede, whose introduction last month in the journal ZooKeys officially welcomed it among the other roughly 13,000 named millipede species worldwide.
Why should you care, you’re asking?
Well, first found in 2018 near the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the millipede’s existence serves as exciting proof to entomologists and naturalists that yet-undiscovered species can still be uncovered in our own backyard.
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“If we’re discovering this new species in the greater Los Angeles area, what else is there?” asked Paul Marek, an entomologist at Virginia Tech who authored the paper. “I think this is really the tip of the iceberg; I think there’s a lot more dwelling underground.”
Discovery of new millipede felt ‘fateful’
Southern California naturalists Cedric Lee and James Bailey were the first to spot the millipede in April 2018.
The pair of experienced naturalists were looking for the rarely-sighted American keeled slug in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park, near Lake Forest, when they instead stumbled upon a specimen they had never before seen.
“The find was exciting for me because only a week prior had I learned that this group of millipedes existed,” Bailey said. “There’s been very few moments where I uncovered something and knew right away it was a new species. This discovery felt fateful in that regard.”
Bailey and Lee − both of whom are named as co-authors on the paper − posted their find to iNaturalist, the citizen science app, where it caught Marek’s attention. While visiting family in Los Angeles around Christmas that year, Marek and his wife Charity Hall made a trip to Whiting Ranch to find the animal for themselves.
December tends to be rainy and wet in Southern California, making it the perfect time to hunt for subterranean millipedes, Marek said.
With a permit from OC Parks, the couple spent a few days searching the undersides of stones, under decaying oak logs and among leaves and other detritus. It wasn’t until they had worked their way lower into the valley that they finally found the creatures they were looking for.
Market collected some male and female specimens, scooping them into plastic vials with a bit of soil to create a terrarium for the trip back to his lab on Virginia Tech’s campus.
DNA sequencing and analysis revealed that the tiny eyeless millipede was indeed a new discovery, and the third species under the genus Illacme. At the suggestion of Bailey and Lee, the species was officially named Illacme socal for the geographical region where it was found.
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“For me, finding a species that doesn’t resemble anything I have previously found is always exciting,” Lee said. “Discovery is just one part of the fun; going back home and trying to figure out what was found is just as thrilling for me, and part of that is learning more about the critters around us.”
Millipedes perform valuable, if underappreciated, role in our ecosystem
Contrary to popular belief, millipedes are not insects but arthropod invertebrates. The ancient animals have been living on Earth for around 500 million years, where Marek said they serve as the oldest evidence of atmospheric oxygen breathing animals on the planet.
The Illacme socal species displays plenty of troglomorphic features − blindness, lack of pigmentation and thin appendages − that have allowed it to adapt to living in darkness underground. Marek believes that based on geographical distribution, the family of millipedes to which the species belongs predates the breaking apart of the supercontinent Pangea.
“It retains a lot of these really primitive characteristics,” he said.
If they tend to give you the willies, just know that they also play a vital role in our ecosystem. As detrivores, millipedes devour and break down dead plant matter for food, excreting nutrients that keep the soil healthy.
“If it wasn’t for them we’d be basically swimming in decaying leaves, decaying organic matter, fallen logs, vegetable matter from plants in the forest,” Marek said. “These detritovores are definitely a group that are not celebrated as things like pollinators, but they’re doing the dirty work.”
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLagatta.