An international group of researchers coordinated by the University of Trieste has discovered a new species of shrimp in Antarctica. Its scientific name is Orchomenella rinamontiae, it belongs to the order of amphipods and was identified near the Mario Zucchelli Italian Antarctic Station by Piero Giulianini, zoologist and professor at the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Trieste, during the XXXIII Italian Antarctic expedition in Terra Nova Bay.
An important discovery, which opens new avenues and represents a significant step forward in understanding marine life and biodiversity in the most remote and inhospitable regions, as also underlined by zoologist and professor Piero Giulianini: “The initial aim of the research was to verify the responses of a species of Antarctic shrimp to sea warming. However, morphological and genetic analyses revealed that some of the samples belonged to a species never described before. These specimens are scavenger shrimps that play a key role in marine communities, consuming and dispersing food of all sizes. As if it were a litmus test, monitoring the abundance and diversity of these shrimps will allow us to understand the ongoing anthropic impacts on these delicate ecosystems”.
In detail, the researchers intend to study how the new species will respond to ocean warming. For the morphological analysis, the researchers used an innovative and advanced imaging technique, X-ray microtomography, a discovery that also highlights the importance of combining physical and genetic analyses for species classification. The study involved the research groups of applied zoology and applied genomics of the University of Trieste (Piero Giulianini, Samuele Greco, Elisa D’Agostino, Marco Gerdol, Alberto Pallavicini, Chiara Manfrin) with the contribution of two experts in the field of Antarctic shrimp classification: Claude de Broyer of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and Ed Hendrycks of the Canadian Museum of Nature. A physicist and a zoologist from the University of Calabria (Sandro Donato and Anita Giglio) participated in the analysis of the X-ray microtomography data performed at the Sincrotrone Elettra in Trieste.