Photo courtesy of Marian Kloon via Flickr.
A bed of mussels cling to a rusty pipe.
By Lily Benn ’24
Staff Writer
Every year, on average, 2,000 new species are discovered through various types of fieldwork, according to the Ocean Census, and an interesting new one has just been identified. A paper published in January of 2024 in Part I of the journal Deep Sea Research, titled Oceanographic Research Papers reported that a tiny shallow oceanic species of mussel has officially been identified and named: Vadumodiolus teredinicola.
According to The New York Times, this species is related to a species of deepwater mussels that lives 1,500 feet below the ocean’s surface. The article explained that this mussel was discovered by scientists from Northeastern University in Boston, and Director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center and Professor of Marine Science Dr. Daniel Distel published the finding. The species had not been discovered in popular Western science because they only live in an extremely specific underwater environment, the article elaborated.
In 2004, one of the many hurricanes that swept the southern coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico moved enough sand in an area 10 miles off the coast of Alabama to reveal an ancient ice-age forest, The New York Times reported. This forest grew 45,000 to 70,000 years ago and was discovered by fishermen who saw trees on the ocean floor in 2012, according to Alabama.com.
These newly-discovered mussels live underwater within the ice-age old bald cypress forest, but they rely on many other species to survive, The New York Times elaborated. According to Cynthia Hibbert of Phys.org, the mussels were discovered while Distel and his team were researching shipworms, a type of marine clam living in the dead trees of the Alabama underwater forest. Distel explained that the mussels specifically live inside the old burrows of deceased shipworms, where they crawl in as larvae and, once adult, can no longer leave due to their growth. Their full-grown size is comparable to the size of a rice grain or a thumbnail, Distel explained.
The discovery of these small and fragile mussels may lend itself to marine evolutionary history, specifically due to the large deep-sea mussels that the smaller mussels are related to, according to The New York Times. This species has a symbiotic relationship with bacteria inside the burrows, allowing them to digest hydrogen sulfide, which is a shared trait of their larger deepwater cousins, The New York Times reported.
Distel and his team hypothesized that due to the existence of these much smaller and shallower mussels, there may have been a different species of shallow sulfide-eating mussel that was the ancestor of the deep-sea mussels.
According to Phys.org, this species is also important to the oceanography and marine scientific community as it was the first species discovered and listed by the global alliance and organization Ocean Census. The organization writes that it aims to advance marine science by describing and naming 100,000 new ocean species and help with biodiversity conservation amidst a changing climate through education and exploration.