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LOS ANGELES — The City of Los Angeles, a metropolis of freeways and traffic, has a newly discovered species named after him: the Los Angeles thread millipede.
The tiny arthropod was found underground by naturalists in a Southern California hiking area near a highway, a Starbucks and an Oakley sunglasses store.
About the length of a paper clip but thin as a pencil lead, it is translucent and sinuous like the tentacle of a jellyfish. The creature burrows four inches underground, secretes unusual chemicals, and is blind, relying on the horn-like antennae protruding from its head to find its way.
Under a microscope, the millipede with its 486 legs and helmet-shaped head looks like a creature in a Hollywood monster movie.
“It’s amazing to think that these millipedes are crawling through the internal cracks and crevices between small pieces of rock beneath our feet in Los Angeles,” said entomologist Paul Marek of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He was part of the research team that included scientists from West Virginia University and the University of California, Berkeley.
‘To the neck’
Their findings on the species, whose scientific name is Illacme socal, were published June 21 in the journal ZooKeys. The vernacular name for the species is the Los Angeles Thread Millipede.
“This shows that there is an undiscovered underground planet,” Marek added.
It joins other millipedes found in the state, including one that until recently had the crown of the most legs of any creature ever recorded: a whopping 750 limbs. It is aptly called Illacme plenipes, Latin for “in the highest fulfillment of the feet.” Discovered in 1926 in a small area in Northern California, it was believed to be the longest-legged creature on earth until 2021 when A millipede with 1,306 legs was found in Australia.
Millipedes feed on dead organic material and without them people would be “up to their necks,” Marek said.
“By knowing something about the species that fill these really important ecological roles, we can protect them and then the environment that protects us as well,” Marek said.
‘Undescribed Species’
iNaturalist, a citizen naturalist app, led Marek to the discovery. Naturalists Cedric Lee and James Bailey published the creature they found when they were collecting slugs at Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in nearby Orange County four years ago. The team used DNA sequencing and analysis to prove that it was a new species.
Lee, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, has discovered and documented thirty species of centipedes in California. He said microorganisms have often been neglected in the search for new species, but thanks to modern tools available to anyone, citizen science can be a bridge between the natural world and the laboratory.
“We don’t know what’s completely out there,” Lee said. “There are literally undescribed species right under our feet.”
Scientists estimate that 10 million animal species live on Earth, but only a million have been discovered.
“What we don’t know is much more than we do in terms of species of insects and small creatures around the world,” said Brian Brown, curator of entomology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
‘We need to know what’s up’
Having led a four-year research project called BioSCAN, which placed insect traps in city backyards, Brown estimates that 20,000 species of insects, both discovered and undiscovered, live in Los Angeles alone.
But he worries about threats to native species like climate change and invasive species.
“It’s really going to take a lot more work and effort to try to save, to try to document species before they go extinct,” he said.
Daniel Gluesenkamp, president of the California Institute for Biodiversity, who was not involved in the research, points to Los Angeles’ Thread Millipede as the perfect example of an uncharted frontier.
“We need to invest in local parks, we need to save any small piece of wilderness, even if it’s surrounded by homes and parking lots,” Gluesenkamp said. “We need to know what’s there so we can protect it and use it as a solution in the tremendously challenging times ahead.”
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