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Back in 2018 in the run-up to the US midterm elections, I decided to send people a photo of a millipede if they tweeted at me that they had voted. I had 200+ responses, so I was burning through my millipede photos real quick.

At one point,

got her photo for sending in her absentee ballot (see this tweet: twitter.com/derekhennen/st). That was a photo of a millipede from southern Ohio, Cambala annulata.

引用ツイート

Derek Hennen, Ph.D.

@derekhennen

· 2018年10月31日

返信先: @RiverSovereignさん

That early vote earned you a close-up of Cambala annulata, one of the royal crested millipedes! Notice its neat line of eyes! Usually millipede eyes are in a triangular field when present.

To everyone (including me!), it was as normal of a millipede photo as you can get. But if you're

@SReboleira

, you have AMAZING vision and a preternatural talent for spying tiny fungi. She saw something no one else did!

返信先:

午後11:41 · 2020年5月14日TweetDeck

さん

But take a closer look and you can see tiny fungal bodies on the first ring of the millipede! Here's the fungus, circled in red ().

返信先:

さん

She and her colleagues have been describing lots of these fungi from millipedes for the past decade, so they know what to look for. They had some specimens of these millipedes in natural history collections of Paris & Copenhagen, so they took a look in hopes of finding specimens!

And find specimens they did! They were able to take the fungus off the millipede and describe them. Around this time, they contacted me for more info on the specimen I tweeted about, and I happily obliged.

So now the fungus is known from two millipede species in the genus Cambala, and 3 spots from the US: in Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia (see map). Weirdly, they're all super close in longitude.

Fittingly, since the fungus was first noticed from my tweet, they've named the fungus in

@Twitter

's honor: Troglomyces twitteri!

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As far as we know, this is the first species discovered thanks to a Twitter collaboration, joining the New Species from Social Media Club! Other members: Facebook, Instagram, iNaturalist, and Flickr.

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Sooooo if you haven't figured it out yet, social media can be pretty handy for discovering and describing the world's biodiversity. (Also this is something

@BioInFocus

predicted 2 weeks ago, watch his talk: twitter.com/BioInFocus/sta)

引用ツイート

Morgan Jackson, PhD

@BioInFocus

· 2020年5月14日

#HumbleBrag but I totally called this scenario & honorific in my @EntsocAmerica talk 2 weeks ago (esa.confex.com/esa/2020intl/m @ 10:25)

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