Episode 209: Animals Discovered in 2020
b"Here's a 2020 retrospective episode that looks at the bright side of the year! Thanks to Page for the suggestion! Let's learn about some animals discovered in 2020 (mostly).\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nWatch This Giant, Eerie, String-Like Sea Creature Hunt for Food in the Indian Ocean\\n\\nRare Iridescent Snake Discovered in Vietnam\\n\\nAn intrusive killer scorpion points the way to six new species in Sri Lanka\\n\\nWhat may be the longest (colony) animal in the world, a newly discovered siphonophore:\\n\\n \\n\\nNew whale(s) just dropped:\\n\\n \\n\\nA newly discovered pygmy seahorse:\\n\\n\\n\\nA newly discovered pipefish is extremely red:\\n\\n\\n\\nSo tiny, so newly discovered, Jonah's mouse lemur:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Popa langur looks surprised to learn that it's now considered a new species of monkey:\\n\\n \\n\\nThe newly\\xa0rediscovered devil eyed frog. I love him:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe newly discovered Lilliputian frog looks big in this picture but is about the size of one of your fingernails:\\n\\n\\n\\nThis newly discovered snake from Vietnam is iridescent and shiny:\\n\\n\\n\\nA new giant scorpion was discovered in Sri Lanka and now lives in our nightmares:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Gollum snakehead was technically discovered in 2019 but we're going to let that slide:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nVery recently, Page suggested the topic \\u201canimals discovered in 2020.\\u201d Since I was already thinking of doing something like this, I went ahead and bumped his suggestion to the top of the list and here we go!\\n\\nYou\\u2019d think that with so many people in the world, there wouldn\\u2019t be too many more new animals to discover, especially not big ones. But new scientific discoveries happen all the time! Many are for small organisms, of course, like frogs and insects, but there are still unknown large animals out there. In fact, 503 new animals were officially discovered in 2020. Every single one is so amazing that I had a hard time deciding which ones to highlight. In most cases we don\\u2019t know much about these new animals since studying an animal in the wild takes time, but finding the animal in the first place is a good start.\\n\\nMany of the newly discovered species live in the ocean, especially the deep sea. In April of 2020, a deep-sea expedition off the coast of western Australia spotted several dozen animals new to science, including what may be the longest organism ever recorded. It\\u2019s a type of siphonophore, which isn\\u2019t precisely a single animal the way that, say, a blue whale is. It\\u2019s a colony of tiny animals, called zooids, all clones although they perform different functions so the whole colony can thrive. Some zooids help the colony swim, while others have tiny tentacles that grab prey, and others digest the food and disperse the nutrients to the zooids around it. Many siphonophores emit bioluminescent light to attract prey.\\n\\nSome siphonophores are small but some can grow quite large. The Portuguese man o\\u2019 war, which looks like a floating jellyfish, and which we talked about way back in episode 16, is actually a type of siphonophore. Its stinging tentacles can be 100 feet long, or 30 m. Other siphonophores are long, transparent, gelatinous strings that float through the depths of the sea, snagging tiny animals with their tiny tentacles, and that\\u2019s the kind this newly discovered siphonophore is.\\n\\nThe new siphonophore was spotted at a depth of about 2,000 feet, or 625 meters, and was floating in a spiral shape. The scientists estimated that the spiral was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters, and that the outer ring alone was probably 154 feet long, or 47 meters. The entire organism might have measured 390 feet long, or almost 119 meters. It\\u2019s been placed into the genus Apolemia although it hasn\\u2019t been formally described yet.\\n\\nAnother 2020 discovery off the coast of Australia was an entire coral reef a third of a mile tall, or 500 meters, and almost a mile across, or 1.5 km. It\\u2019s part of the Great Barrier Reef but isn\\u2019t near the..."