Mycena luxaeterna, a new species of bioluminescent mushroom from Brazil, “glow[s] nonstop in the Brazilian rain forest.” The image is via National Geographic and courtesy of Eiji Nagasawa of the Tottori Mycological Institute.

More biolumescent fungi: M. chlorophos has been known since the 1800s. The image is via National Geographic and Cassius V. Stevani of the Chemistry Institute at the University of Sao Paulo.

Panellus Stipticus displaying bioluminescence (via Wikipedia):

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A World Wildlife Federation report highlights some fascinating new species discoveries from Southeast Asia. In addition to various species of amphibians and reptiles, “a new wild banana and, even rarer, two new types of mammal” were described as well. Researchers also discovered “feathers in the frog’s faeces, proving that it eats small birds.” More from CBS News:

A gecko with leopard-like spots on its body and a fanged frog that eats birds are among 163 new species discovered last year in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia, an environmental group said Friday.WWF International said that scientists in 2008 discovered 100 plants, 28 fish, 18 reptiles, 14 amphibians, two mammals and one bird species in the region. That works out to be about three species a week and is in addition to the 1,000 new species catalogued there from 1997 to 2007, the group said.

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Among the stars in the new list is a fanged frog in eastern Thailand. Given the scientific name Limnonectes megastomias, the frog lies in wait along streams for prey including birds and insects. Scientists believe it uses its fangs during combat with other males.

Another unusual discovery was the Cat Ba leopard gecko found on Cat Ba Island in northern Vietnam. Named Goniurosaurus catbaensis, it has large, orange-brown catlike eyes and leopard spots down the length of its yellowish brown body.

Lee Grismer, of La Sierra University in California, said he found a tiger-stripped pit viper in Vietnam described in the report while he was attempting to capture a second gecko species.

“We were engrossed in trying to catch a new species of gecko when my son pointed out that my hand was on a rock mere inches away from the head of a pit viper,” Grismer said in a statement. “We caught the snake and the gecko and they both proved to be new species.”

More at WWF

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These new species of frog, discovered in Peru, are found in high altitudinal forests, and they lay terrestrial eggs from which froglets—not tadpoles—hatch. More images and information on these new discoveries can be found at Wildlife Extra:

The three new species are small frogs, up to 24 mm long in females and 19 mm in males. In contrast to most amphibian species, eggs of these frogs are laid in moist, terrestrial microhabitats, such as under mosses or the leaf litter, and embryos do not develop into aquatic tadpoles. Instead, minute froglets hatch from the eggs to lead a fully terrestrial life. The mother remain near the eggs to protect them from insect predators and dessication. Clutches contain 18-25 eggs that measure approximately 4-5 mm in diameter. Recently hatched froglets measure approximately 5 mm in snout-vent length.

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Image: The Bosavi woolly rat is but one of many new species discovered in Papua New Guinea. More about these new species from Papua New Guinea can be found at Nature.com and the Daily Mail.

Video: Via the BBC and courtesy of Lost Land of the Volcano – BBC/ Discovery Channel.

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A new species of Nepenthes pitcher plant has been discovered in a remote region of the Philippines. After being rescued, they described the mammoth carnivorous plant. Apparently, some missionaries who became lost in the wilderness originally discovered it. Consequently, a research expedition of pitcher plant specialists returned and found it.

The new species of tropical pitcher plant has been named after David Attenborough—Nepenthes attenboroughii (pictured). Furthermore, the newly discovered species is also described as being “the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.” Additionally, according to a thread on Terraforums.com, “It seems unfortunately this species is critically endangered and present as less than a few hundred individuals in just one location.” From the BBC News:

Word that this new species of pitcher plant existed initially came from two Christian missionaries who in 2000 attempted to scale Mount Victoria, a rarely visited peak in central Palawan in the Philippines.
With little preparation, the missionaries attempted to climb the mountain but became lost for 13 days before being rescued from the slopes.

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Accompanied by three guides, the team hiked through lowland forest, finding large stands of a pitcher plant known to science called Nepenthes philippinensis, as well as strange pink ferns and blue mushrooms which they could not identify.

As they closed in on the summit, the forest thinned until eventually they were walking among scrub and large boulders

“At around 1,600 metres above sea level, we suddenly saw one great pitcher plant, then a second, then many more,” McPherson recounts.

“It was immediately apparent that the plant we had found was not a known species.”

David Attenborough in the video below describes the tropical pitcher plant family and N. rajah: “It’s so big that it catches not just insects but even small rodents, and one was recorded that had in it the body of a drowned rat, so if ever there was a carnivore among plants this is it.”

This video shows a mouse falling into a Nepenthes trap:

The first three images are by Alastair Robinson. The last image above was found here.

Similar from The Conservation Report: “NEW SPECIES: Rat-eating plant discovered in Cape York“

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Despite population growth, in addition to habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, scientists continue to describe and catalogue new species. From The Associated Press:

The WWF is calling on the countries to develop a conservation plan for the region — which also includes parts of Myanmar and Tibet — and for governments to give local communities more authority to manage the forests, grasslands and wetlands.

The group found that almost three-quarters of the discoveries between 1998 and 2008 were plants, including 21 new orchid species. But it also listed 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, two birds, two mammals and at least 60 new invertebrates. Most of the discoveries have already been reported in peer-reviewed, scientific journals.

Among the most exciting was the miniature muntjac, the world’s smallest deer species — standing just 60-80 centimeters (25-30 inches) tall and weighing about 24 pounds (11 kilograms). Scientists at first believed the animal found in northern Myanmar was a juvenile of another species, but DNA tests confirmed it was distinct.

Image credit: AP Photo/Totul Bortamuli, WWF Nepal

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A new species of bulbul—a type of songbird from Africa and Asia—has been discovered in a remote Laotian forest. As Andrew Revkin notes, “Despite the ever-spreading imprint of humanity on this small planet, scientists keep discovering new species, even among relatively conspicuous classes of vertebrates like mammals and birds.”

Compared to discoveries of invertebrates or smaller vertebrates such as amphibians and reptiles, discoveries of new bird and mammal species are relatively uncommon. The rule of thumb seems to be; new discoveries of large animals are very rare. Likewise, remote and unexplored areas yield more new species.

However, this isn’t always the case. A new species of salamander was recently discovered in northern Georgia, and a new species of ghost slug was described from a Cardiff garden (note these are new discoveries of small animals, so it’s doubtful that new species of large mammals remain undiscovered in the United States).

The largest new animals discovered include various species of primates, muntjac, and a new species of bovine that represents a new genus as well. From CBC.ca:

The bare-faced bulbul is a thrush-sized, olive green bird with a light-coloured breast and a bald, pink face. It lives in the trees of a sparse forest among limestone mountains called karsts in Laos.

It is described in the 2009 issue of Forktail, the journal of the U.K.-based Oriental Bird Club, by the scientists who discovered it, Will Duckworth and Rob Timmins of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and the Iain Woxvold of the University of Melbourne.

Bulbuls are a family of about 130 species of songbirds found in Asia, and the bare-faced bulbul is the first new one in more than a century, the society reported.

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However, in the recent expedition, similar birds were seen in two limestone karst areas quite far from one another, Clyne said, adding that it’s not clear how common the birds are.

The research observed pairs of birds eating berries and flitting among the trees. They took photographs, recorded the birds’ calls, and captured some and took blood samples, they reported. A couple of specimens were brought back to the Natural History Museum in Tring, U.K., and the Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra, Australia, but Clyne did not know if they are on display.

Over the past decade, Timmins had also found a new species of rodent and a striped rabbit in the same area, the release said.

Images credited to Iain Woxvold/University of Melbourne

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There are still things out there to discover. It makes you wonder, what else is out there?

— John Maerz

More about this discovery can be found at National Geographic and the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

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The spiny-crested katydid below may be a new species or it “may be a Diacanthodis formidabilis, but the only known specimen of that species was lost after it was documented in 1838 in Brazil.”

This walking-leaf katydid appears to be different from “previously known walking-leaf katydid.”

Via National Geographic and Conservation International. More about the expedition to Nangaritza, Ecuador can be found here.

See more animal camouflage

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The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University has announced its top ten new species for 2009. Among the new species are a “gigantic new species and genus of palm with fewer than 100 individuals found only in a small area of northwestern Madagascar;” an exceptionally cryptic and the “smallest known seahorse with a standard length of 13.8mm (0.54 inches);” the smallest known snake “with a total length of 104mm (4.1 inches);” a “new caffeine-free coffee from Cameroon, the first record of a caffeine-free species from Central Africa;” and a “new species of extremophile bacteria was discovered in hairspray.” You can nominate your favorite new species for 2010 here.Image: S. Blair Hedges

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More information and images can be found at National Geographic. Image by Miguel Vences

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Microbial life is known to survive in some of the most extreme environments on the plant: around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, within hot acid springs (the image at right shows a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park), or deep within caves.  To add to this impressive list, scientists have recently found microbes surviving in the stratosphere and underneath glaciers in the Antarctic.

The stratosphere is the “portion of the Earth’s atmosphere ranging from approximately 14 km to 22 km (8 to 12 miles),” and it contains the ozone layer. The discovery of bacteria that can withstand intense bombardment of ultraviolet radiation fuels the theory that Earth was colonized by microbial life from space. However, some scientists believe that these new species of microbes are not unique to the stratosphere and may have been picked up by dust storms.

Nonetheless, the discovery illustrates the durability and versatility of life. Europa—one of Jupiter’s many moons—is perhaps the best shot to finding life in our solar system, and given the vastness of the universe, certainly life isn’t unique to planet Earth.  Although, intelligent life might be extremely rare (see the Fermi Paradox). From the Indian Space Research Organisation:

In all, 12 bacterial and six fungal colonies were detected, nine of which, based on 16S RNA gene sequence, showed greater than 98% similarity with reported known species on earth. Three bacterial colonies, namely, PVAS-1, B3 W22 and B8 W22 were, however, totally new species. All the three newly identified species had significantly higher UV resistance compared to their nearest phylogenetic neighbours. Of the above, PVAS-1, identified as a member of the genus Janibacter, has been named Janibacter hoylei. sp. nov. The second new species B3 W22 was named as Bacillus isronensis sp.nov. and the third new species B8 W22 as Bacillus aryabhata.

The precautionary measures and controls operating in this experiment inspire confidence that these species were picked up in the stratosphere. While the present study does not conclusively establish the extra-terrestrial origin of microorganisms, it does provide positive encouragement to continue the work in our quest to explore the origin of life.

Are these new microbes an extraterrestrial species? From Wired News:

Not so fast, said University of Washington astrobiologist John Baross.
“It is extremely unlikely that these organisms are extraterrestrial,” wrote Baross in an email, “and they are likely to originate from soil on Earth.”

Bacteria is often found in the stratosphere, and most can be traced to wind-borne dust particles. That the new species were previously unknown means little. Scientists have identified just one percent of all Earthly bacteria. And though the species hadn’t been seen, their gene sequences were familiar; they represent a variation on known life, rather than an entirely new form.

But they might still be useful, said Baross. For years, researchers have wondered if bacteria might be capable not only of surviving space, but growing in it. If the new bugs turn out to thrive at the edges of Earth’s atmosphere — baked by solar radiation and deprived of liquid water, at Antarctic temperatures — researchers can study them to learn how a spacecraft-riding terrestrial microbe contaminate another extreme-but-liveable environment, such as the surface of Mars.

With no replenishing supply of nutrients or photosynthesis, bacteria are surviving isolated underneath a glacier in Antarctica. From Chemistry World:

Researchers in the US and the UK have found microbes in the Antarctic that appear to have survived in isolation, without sunlight or new supplies of nutrients, for more than a million years. The discovery suggests that similar microbes could have survived the supposed ’snowball Earth’ periods, when our planet may have been covered by ice, or could even exist elsewhere in the solar system.

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Jill Mikucki of Harvard University and others have found one of the most isolated forms of life ever discovered. They have taken samples from Blood Falls, a reddish outlet of fluid on an edge of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. The fluid comes from a pocket of very salty ancient seawater that was trapped in the glacier between 1.5 and 4 million years ago. DNA analysis showed that it contained several different types of microbe, while chemical analysis revealed a crucial absence of oxygen, the characteristic by-product of photosynthesis.

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The researchers suggest that microbes relying on a similar ’sulphur cycle’ could have existed at periods in the Earth’s history when some paleoclimatologists think most of the surface was covered in ice and there would have been little photosynthesis. Moreover, they say the trapped fluid deposit at Blood Falls could function as a laboratory for the study of possible life in other harsh environments, including Mars’s frozen icecaps and Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.

Bo Barker Jorgenson, a microbial ecologist at the Max-Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, thinks the study is ‘very interesting’ but notes that there are possibly more isolated forms of life, such as bacteria that are known to have lived on deep seabeds for over 100 million years. ‘Whether [the study] sheds new light on the potential for microbial life during snowball Earth periods, I am not so sure,’ he adds.

More from Popular Science:

Further analysis revealed that the microorganisms were more similar to marine organisms than to those found on land, which led to the conclusion that the ancestors of the microbes living under Taylor Glacier probably lived in the ocean at one time. When the floor of the Dry Valleys rose more than 1.5 million years ago, a pool of seawater was trapped and then eventually covered by the glacier when it advanced. The researchers believe that, with no light to make food through photosynthesis, the microbes adapted over 1.5 million years to use sulfur and iron compounds to survive.

The microbes’ similarity to other marine species suggests that the community under the glacier may be the remnant of a larger population that once occupied a fjord or sea, where they would have received sunlight. When the Taylor Glacier advanced, sealing off the microbes’ habitat under a thick ice cap, some of the population probably declined, while others were able to adapt to the changing environment. Mikucki said the briny pond “is a unique sort of time capsule from a period in Earth’s history.”

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Photo source for attribution. The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.

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A new species of babbler, the Nonggang babbler (Stachyris nonggangensis), was recently described from the province of Guangxi, which is located in south-west China.

IMAGE CREDIT: James Eaton; Birdtour Asia. From BirdLife International:

Ornithologists, Zhou Fang and Jiang Aiwu from Guangxi University first sighted the birds in surveys during 2005 and confirmed its identity as an undescribed taxon the following year. A formal description was published in a recent edition of leading ornithological journal The Auk.

In general behaviour it resembles a wren-babbler of the genus Napothera in that it prefers running to flying, and seems to spend most of its time on the ground foraging for insects between rocks and under fallen leaves. This is in contrast to other closely-related babbler species that spend most of their time foraging in undergrowth and trees, seldom coming to the ground. No nest has yet been found. About 100 pairs of the birds have been observed in Nonggang.

“I have been studying birds in the region since the 1970s but I had never seen it before. Their habitat in the reserve is protected”, Zhou says. “But as they could also exist in the karst rainforest outside the reserve, logging and burning wood to make charcoal pose a threat to their wider habitat.”

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A new species of iguana has been recognized from an area in the Galápagos Archipelago. From National Geographic, DC:

The pink iguana, named after its salmon-colored skin, lives only on the Wolf volcano on the island of Isabela.

Charles Darwin did not visit the volcano on his travels to the Ecuadorian island chains in the 1830s, so the creature remained undiscovered until 1986, when it was spotted by park rangers. Only now has it been recognized as its own species.

Gabriele Gentile, of Rome’s University Tor Vergata, and colleagues are the first team to research and document the iguana, which will receive a formal scientific name in an upcoming paper.

“What’s surprising is that a new species of megafauna, like a large lizard, may still be [found] in a well-studied archipelago,” Gentile told National Geographic News.

The photograph above is by Gabriele Gentile (he is shown in the image below) and his assistant. The images were found here and here.

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Google continues to demonstrate its utility. A scientist using Google Earth discovered a “7,000 hectares of forest, rich in biodiversity” in northern Mozambique. The forest was subsequently inventoried by a British-led expedition, which described several new species. The image at left, by Julian Bayliss, shows a pygmy chameleon (Rhampholeon sp.), and more images can be found at Wildlife Extra. From Telegraph.co.uk:

Julian Bayliss, a scientist for Kew based in the region, discovered Mount Mabu while searching on Google Earth for a possible conservation project. He was looking at areas of land 5,400ft (1,600m) above sea level where more rainfall means there is likely to be forest.

To his surprise he found the patches of green that denote wooded areas, in places that had not previously been explored. After taking a closer look on more detailed satellite maps, he went to have a look.

An expedition was organised for this autumn with 28 scientists from the UK, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and Switzerland. The group was able to stay at an abandoned tea estate but had to hack through difficult terrain and use 70 porters in order to carry out their investigations.

Within weeks they had discovered three new species of Lepidoptera butterfly and a new member of the Gaboon viper family of snakes that can kill a human in a single bite. There were also blue duiker antelope, samango monkeys, elephant shrews, almost 200 different types of butterflies and thousands of tropical plants

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