New species of “supergiant” isopod uncovered | Hacker News Reader

New species of “supergiant” isopod uncovered

news.nus.edu.sg

74 pointskanobo24 comments

Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_LOT09...

These things are cool.

Sorry, the site is down now, but here is a cached version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200826125737/https://news.nus....

> The new giant isopod species was described from two specimens, ... 950 and 1,260 metres, during the South Java Deep Sea Biodiversity Expedition 2018

If you skim-read the article, you might end up with a very different picture in your head.

They're still pretty big, but not destroying Tokyo anytime soon.

You missed an important part of the sentence:

> collected off the southern coast of West Java in Indonesia, from a depth of between 950 and 1,260 metres

the specimens were not 1km long.

You missed an important part of the sentence:

> skim-read

I then went back to read the sentence properly, but thank you for including the missing part for those who didn't read the article.

Indeed, my bad. I misunderstood your comment as saying skim-readers might miss that sentence and only see the sizes on pictures.

This might be a relative of our pill bugs? But there is probably a lot more evolution between them than between, e.g., horses and sharks. Which, by the way, is also bigger than between bony fish and sharks.

Yes, pill bugs are also isopods.

I've always been fascinated by pill bugs, also known as "Armadillidiidae" [1] they are such cool creatures. I don't know why, but the fact that they are land-dwelling crustaceans was just interesting to me.

I had no idea something like this size and related existed in the sea! Incredible! I wonder now what the evolutionary tree looks like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillidiidae

Order Isopoda [1] on Wikipedia if anyone else is interested.

Edit: Corrected Family -> Order - oops! Thank you pvaldes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopoda

Isopoda is an Order. This is in family Cirolanidae, so it has much smaller cousins in each beach.

It seems there is an opportunity here, crouching like a cat, to dedicate one of this new species to Hayao Miyazaki. Bathynomus ohmu seems an pretty convenient name also. Maybe the next.

Sorry, wrong direction: sharks and horses are closer than sharks and tuna.

> The team says that the discovery is an example of deep-sea gigantism

Are there theories about this phenomenon? Does this explain the historically atypical size of the dinosaurs? Why doesn't it continue to happen? For example, why aren't there giant robins (birds) or tiny ones? Is there not a single eco-system ever where this would be an advantage?

From another article on the same discovery

It does, generally on islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism

Humans tend to exterminate them.

I think that’s an over generalization. The La Brea tarpit types were extinguished due to climate change. It’s also postulated mammoths and such were also affected by climate change, food availability and hunting. None the less, before humans came on the scene large animals came and went.

Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction.

Well, sure, there are loads that died out before humans showed up. But of those that existed when we showed up, we have exterminated almost all of them.

> Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction.

Often it wasn't even hunting. New Zealand's various giant ground parrots weren't THAT delicious. We introduced invasive species which did the extermination for us, in that case (and many/most bird-y cases, at least).

Hard to know how you could state this so confidently, snacked on a kakapo recently?

And also in environments with high oxygen concentration. At one point dragonflies were the size of cats (the cause is different from deep sea gigantism).

I'd expect giants to be more vulnerable to changes in the ecosystem. A new species is introduced that creates competition and the giants can't adapt to a new niche.

I imagine deep-sea is an ecosystem that doesn't get disrupted often. Little new introduction of species. Little human intervention.

I'm kinda disappointed, these aren't much larger than the giant isopods that you can buy at a well-stocked Asian grocery.

Could we leave these animals out in the ocean please? I know that there will be people that want to eat them because it gives them some kind of superpower you‘ve never heard of. But if you look at the year 2020 you may know that wild species can give you wild diseases. Or maybe we just limit interaction with these species only to scientists ghat know how to handle them.

You got downvoted by CCP

I understand the sentiment to a point, but isn’t it essentially impossible to get diseases from deep sea isopods? If we should be exploring any unknown creatures, deep sea creatures seem relatively safe if you are aiming to avoid transmissible diseases.

Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know much about this stuff.

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