
New species of “supergiant” isopod uncovered - kanobo
https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/new-species-supergiant-isopod-uncovered
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lxe
Cached:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_LOT09...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_LOT09jUbVIJ:https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/new-
species-supergiant-isopod-uncovered+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

These things are cool.

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kanobo
Sorry, the site is down now, but here is a cached version:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200826125737/https://news.nus....](https://web.archive.org/web/20200826125737/https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/new-
species-supergiant-isopod-uncovered)

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dane-pgp
> 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.

~~~
progval
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.

~~~
dane-pgp
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.

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

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ncmncm
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.

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sixdimensional
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillidiidae)

~~~
sixdimensional
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopoda)

~~~
pvaldes
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.

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chiefalchemist
> 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

~~~
rsynnott
It does, generally on islands:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism)

Humans tend to exterminate them.

~~~
mc32
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.

~~~
rsynnott
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).

~~~
snori74
Hard to know how you could state this so confidently, snacked on a kakapo
recently?

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

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C4ne
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.

~~~
steve_adams_86
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.

