(21-01-11) Scientists of the investigation group ECOMARG of the IEO have described a new species to science, the third one described up to now in the Marine Protected Area El Cachucho (Spain).

     After the scientist community accepted the isopod Haplomesus longiramus and the amphipod Liropus cachuchoensis, the scientists of the investigation group ECOMARG of the IEO have published the taxonomic and ecologic description of the Politolana sanchezi, a small crustacean that lives in the bottoms of Southern Gulf of Biscay.

    Inmaculada Frutos, researcher in the Spanish Oceanographic Institute (IEO) and Jean Claude Sorbe from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) have published in the magazine Zootaxa the taxonomic and ecologic description of a this new species to science: Politolana sanchezi.

    This small isopod crustacean is the third species the scientists of the investigation group of the IEO ECOMARG describe and publish in the Marine Protected Area in El Cachucho.

    Politolana sanchezi is almost 2 cm long and lives in the soft seabed of the Gulf of Biscay and western Galicia, at between 480 and 829 m. depth.

    The small crustacean can buried itself in the mood 5 cm deep, or swim over the seabed as far as one meter over the sediment.

    It has a scavenger and bioturbated behaviour, as it could be seen in a tropic experiment made in a trap baited with fish and put on a photogrammetric sled in one of the campaigns of ECOMARG.

    The specimens studied were obtained during the French campaigns ESSAIS and PROSECAN and the Spanish ECOMARG03 and ECOMARG04 through different sampling devices (two suprabenthic sled, a photogrammetric sled and a dredge box-corer).

    El Cahucho is a hot spot of biodiversity where, only talking about the group of crustaceans, more than 40 species have been found (maybe new to science all of them) and a density of organisms not mentioned elsewhere in the Cantabrian Sea.

    With this one, they are three the species described in the almost three years of investigation. The process is very slow because it is not only describing the animal and its distinguishing features, but also the results have to be assessed by the rest of the scientific community so that they check that the species was not really described in other areas of the planet.