New Cave Dwelling Skeleton Shrimp Discovered in California

by Becky Oskin

A translucent underwater cave dweller that looks like a skeleton and travels like an inchworm is the newest member of California’s array of marine life.

Scientists found a new species of skeleton shrimp — a group of tiny crustaceans that are actually caprellid amphipods, not shrimp — in vials collected from a small cave offshore of Southern California’s Catalina Island. The two vials, one containing a male and one containing a female, were housed in the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

Lead study author José Manuel Guerra-García, a caprellid expert at the University of Seville in Spain, realized the “shrimp” were a never-before-recognized species during a 2010 visit to the museum. Guerra-García compared the ghostlike creatures with other species of the genus, Liropus, and confirmed other scientists had never described the tiny crustaceans…

(read more: Live Science)

photo by SINC