While many of us use social media for cat videos and cake recipes, others use social media to discover new species. In a paper published today in MycoKeys, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Natural History Museum of Denmark reveal a new type of parasitic fungus via Twitter.
It all began as senior author Ana Sofia Reboleira was scrolling though Twitter. There, she stumbled upon a photo of a North American millipede shared by her US colleague Derek Hennen of Virginia Tech. She spotted a few tiny dots that struck her well-trained eyes.
“I could see something looking like fungi on the surface of the millipede,” Reboleira explains. “Until then, these fungi had never been found on American millipedes. So, I went to my colleague and showed him the image. That’s when we ran down to the museum’s collections and began digging.”
The team discovered several specimens of the same fungus on a few of the American millipedes in the Natural History Museum’s enormous collection—fungi that had never before been documented. This confirmed the existence of a previously unknown species of Laboulbeniales, an order of tiny, bizarre, and largely unknown fungal parasites that attack insects and millipedes. The newly discovered parasitic fungus has now been given its official Latin name, Troglomyces twitteri.
“As far as we know, this is the first time that a new species has been discovered on Twitter,” Reboleira says. “It highlights the importance of these platforms for sharing research—and thereby being able to achieve new results. I hope that it will motivate professional and amateur researchers to share more data via social media. This is something that has been increasingly obvious during the coronavirus crisis, a time when so many are prevented from getting into the field or laboratories.”
However, Twitter was not the only tool that made this discovery possible. Reboleira stresses that their result was possible because of her access to one of the world’s largest biological collections.
“Because of our vast museum collection, it was relatively easy to confirm that we were indeed looking at an entirely new species for science,” Reboleira says. “This demonstrates how valuable museum collections are. There is much more hiding in these collections than we know.”
Image: The photo shared on Twitter of the millipede Cambala by Derek Hennen. The two red circles indicate the presence of the fungus. Image courtesy of Derek Hennen.