New Sea Slug Species Discovered Off Taiwan Coast, Ending Nearly 200 Years of Mystery

A new species of sea slug, measuring less than 3 millimeters in length, has been discovered off the northern coast of Taiwan. This new species, named Thecacera sesama, brings the total number of known species in the genus Thecacera to seven, a number that has been suggested for nearly 200 years but had remained unconfirmed until now. The discovery originated from an accidental photograph taken by Ho-Yeung Chan, then an undergraduate student at National Taiwan Ocean University, during a recreational dive in Keelung, northern Taiwan, in 2019. Chan initially did not realize he had photographed a previously unrecorded species. The possibility of a new species emerged after he contacted sea slug expert Hsini Lin via Facebook. The study confirming this finding was a collaborative effort among researchers from National Taiwan Ocean University, the National Museum of Natural Science, and National Taipei University of Education, and was published in the journal ZooKeys. The new species is a small, shell-less sea slug with black and yellow spots, and its extreme small size suggests it may have been overlooked by experts for a long time. This discovery underscores that the Earth's oceans, particularly among tiny organisms living in coral reef crevices or on algae, harbor many life forms yet unknown to humanity. Experts anticipate that further discoveries of such micro-organisms will deepen our understanding of marine biodiversity. Source: Mongabay Indonesia