Media release

From: Supplied by the authors

NEW ZEALAND-LED STUDY DISCOVERS 57 NEW MARINE SPECIES

A four-year study just published in the international journal Micropaleontology records 57 new species of small marine animals (Foraminifera) from around the world. Forty-one of these new species are described and named. The multinational study was led by retired Auckland marine biologist Dr Bruce Hayward. Other members of the 5-person study team are from Australia, Japan, Switzerland and Germany.

The study undertook a complete global review of all the living species in four related families of shallow marine foraminifera. This is only the second global review of a group of foraminifera undertaken using a combination of DNA sequencing and morphological characters. The first such global study was undertaken by the same NZ-led group of scientists and published in 2021.

This new study found that the greatest diversity in these families occurred in the northwest Pacific with 74 species living around the coasts of China and Japan. Next most diverse is the coast of Australia with 58 species. The only region lacking any of these families is Antarctica but 24 species live around the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

The newly recognised species come mostly from the Southern Hemisphere, where they have been less studied over the past 250 years. The first named species in these families was described from the Mediterranean by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The greatest number of new species come from around the coast of southern Africa (13), followed by Australia (9), Northwest Pacific (8), Mediterranean  (5), northern Indian Ocean (5), South America (4), New Zealand (3), Pacific Islands (3), Indonesia (3), Caribbean (2), Arctic Ocean (1) and the Black Sea (1).

“This new study brings the number of recognised species in these families around New Zealand up to 18,” said Dr Hayward. “The types of the three new New Zealand species were collected from Stewart Island, Tolaga Bay and the Waitemata Harbour. They are now housed in the collections of the Museum of Auckland and Earth Science New Zealand.”

Foraminifera are tiny marine organisms similar to amoeba but have chambered shells. Their average size is about 0.4 mm. The foraminifera studied live in their trillions in sea-floor sand and mud in estuaries, harbours, bays and offshore down to about 100 m depth. There are currently 9000 species of living foraminifera in the world and 40,000 described extinct fossil species.

“Foraminifera are widely used to study the impacts on coastal ecosystems of pollution and sediment runoff; to document sea level changes that occurred before tide gauges existed; to study the frequency and size of coastal earthquake displacements and tsunamis; and in the study of past and present climate change,” said Dr Hayward. “We need to be able to identify the foraminifera to be able to use them in these applied studies.”

“Foraminifera are among the most useful for these studies because their shells that are preserved in sediment sequences provide a record of past environmental changes. The specific foraminifera that have been reviewed by our group are among the most important world-wide for these studies,” Hayward said.

“Another outcome of this study was to recognise the enormous extent of accidental human-related transport of marine species around the world in the last few centuries. At least 33 non-indigenous species have been recognised living in places on the opposite side of the world from where they naturally occurred for millions of years prior to now,” said Hayward.