‘Like spaghetti’: Worm-slurping, hopping rats discovered in the Philippines
Nandita Chandraprakash Mongabay.com 26 August 2019
The highly biodiverse island of Luzon in the Philippines has yielded up two species of rats new to science.
Both are found high up on Luzon’s mountains, where they’ve evolved to feed on the earthworms that abound in the lush, wet habitat.
Researchers say they hope the new discoveries, the latest of dozens made here since 2000, will help shine a spotlight on the importance of conserving Luzon’s unique habitats and wildlife.
As you explore the high altitudes of Luzon Island in the Philippines, you’ll encounter plenty of earthworms. There’s an abundance of them. So the ecosystem did exactly what nature does to bring balance: it evolved predators. And the most common earthworm predators here are rats. Two of them, in fact, are new to science, having only just been described in a paper published in July.
“They’re quite bizarre,” says lead author Eric Rickart, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, University of Utah. “They hop around on their sturdy hind legs and large hind feet, almost like little kangaroos. They have long, delicate snouts, and almost no chewing teeth.”
The scientists caught one of these new “tweezer-beaked hopping rats” when they set traps with a regularly employed bait: peanut butter. The first capture, however, happened quite by chance as the rat wasn’t interested in the peanut butter. However, it did slurp up an earthworm when the scientists offered it one as an experiment. Subsequently, when the team, led by the late Danilo Balete of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, set traps with live, wriggling earthworms as bait, they came across the two new earthworm-loving rat species.
Scientists named the new species Rhynchomys mingan and Rhynchomys labo after the mountains they’re respectively found on, Mount Mingan and Mount Labo. Their genus name comes from the ancient Greek rhyncos for “snout,” due to the rats’ long pointed noses, and mys for “mouse.”
The rats catch earthworms by quietly hop-stalking little trails they make among the mud and humus of the forest. Once they detect an earthworm, they quickly pounce. They then brush the dirt off and swallow the worm whole, “like a long spaghetti,” according to the scientists.
“One of the things that’s striking to see was their reflexes — they’re lightning quick,” says Lawrence Heaney, a curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the study. “It later became obvious why they’re that fast. They’re trying to catch a nimble earthworm that's partly in a hole.
The research team and porters at the beginning of the hike to Mount Labo, where one of the two new species was discovered. Heaney, Balete and Alviola are in the front, center. Image by TKTK.
Island evolution
Luzon is the largest Philippine island and, at 27 million years old, one of the oldest oceanic islands in the world with never any direct dry-land connection to continental Asia. With volcanoes and mountain ranges, life in Luzon has rich resources and undisturbed geographical diversity to evolve uniquely. Today, all native animals and plants of Luzon are descendants of ancient species that colonized the island by crossing formidable water barriers. The tweezer-beaked hopping rats of the Rhynchomys genus evolved from a single ancient colonization event 7 million to 9 million years ago. They are found nowhere else on Earth.
These “earthworm rats” had to adapt to the prey available: earthworms. They quietly hop trails, dig deep in the soil, work through leaf litter, or go up the trees among orchids and other epiphytes, all in search of the best sustenance available. The worms are common in Luzon’s high, wet altitudes, with a forest floor covered in fallen plant material that takes a long time to decompose.
An example of the mossy forest habitat where species of Rhynchomys live in northern Luzon. Image by L.R. Heaney.
Scientists find Luzon particularly fascinating because it’s a natural laboratory for studying evolution.
“These interwoven processes occur everywhere, but they can be studied most readily on islands because of the effects of isolation,” Rickart says. As for the rats, they have adapted uniquely to take advantage of the rainforest’s abundance in earthworms and provide a great example of how evolution works as generations of a species are isolated in confined pockets.
Scientists have described 30 new species of mammals in Luzon since 2000 and expect to find more. In that same period, just one new mammal species was discovered in all of Europe, a land mass 92 times larger than Luzon. Rickart and his team say they believe Luzon has the world’s greatest concentration of endemic mammals on the planet.
“There are sky islands within the big island [of Luzon],” Heaney adds.
Conservation of the rats and biodiversity in Luzon
Only 6 percent of the tropical old-growth forests that blanketed the Philippines 500 years ago survive today. The country is losing its rainforests to oil palm plantations and other agricultural interests.
But the two new species are lucky; they live in high-elevation forests — wet, cold and steep — and are not currently threatened by agriculture or logging. Still, experts say geothermal energy development and mining could pose threats down the road. And it may not take much to endanger the new species.
“As far as we know, the two species are geographically restricted to small areas on isolated mountains, so any broad-scale disturbance to their habitat could be a great threat,” Rickart says.
The good news is that scientists have seen a steady rise in the growth of secondary forests, albeit a slow one, over the last 25 years. The earthworm rats don’t necessarily require old-growth forests but do need high-altitude habitats at elevations above 1,500 meters (about 5,000 feet).
“What we see is that as the forest regenerates, the native mammals move back in,” Heaney says.
Cloud field atop Mount Mingan. Cloud forests are believed to contain the maximum mammalian diversity. Image by L.R. Heaney/Field Museum of Natural History.
Locals understand the importance of the forests, especially old-growth ones, against the pummeling of typhoons, according to the researchers. Without forests in higher lands, and the absorbent, mulch-carpeted mossy floors that act as intact watersheds, typhoons can cause extensive damage, including loss of life, due to erosion, landslides, mudslides and floods.
“The local populations and governments want to protect the land on which they depend for water and indirect resources,” Heaney says, adding that the researchers got a lot of support from the Philippines Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
The scientists say they hope the discovery of the tweezer-beaked hopping rats, and of all the other creatures here in recent decades, will put additional focus on conservation in Luzon. When a new species is discovered, it provides publicity and spark, Heaney says: “It often helps a lot to promote the establishment of new protected areas and national parks.” The docile earthworm-slurping rats, it turns out, may inadvertently promote conservation in their home range.
Researchers have discovered a new ground-dwelling forest bird species that lives on Luzon Island of the Philippine archipelago.
Asian Scientist (Sep. 11, 2013) – Researchers have discovered a new ground-dwelling forest bird species that lives on Luzon Island of the Philippine archipelago.
The new species, dubbed the Sierra Madre Ground-Warbler, is described in a paper published in The Condor, a scientific journal of the Cooper Ornithological Society.
“The ground-warblers are very unique birds,” said Pete Hosner, who co-authored the study.
“They’re only known from the northern Philippines, and they have no close relatives. As the name suggests, they’re ground-walking songbirds—rotund, with strong legs and weak wings—and it appears that they can barely fly.”
“They tend to inhabit dense forest understory, where they feed on insects. Their song is extremely high in pitch, and ventriloquial—it’s almost impossible to locate the source of the sound in the forest—they always sound like they are far away, even when they are almost at your feet.”
Hosner said the new species of ground-warbler looks similar to the other two species of ground-warblers in the Philippines, so it wasn’t recognized as an independent species at first.
“The three species of ground-warblers now recognized are essentially identical in size, shape and juvenile plumage coloration held in their first year of life, but they differ from one another in adult plumage coloration,” he said.
According to Hosner, the reason that this new species remained undescribed for so long was that the adult plumage of the very first ground-warbler to be described was unknown.
That species, Cordilleran Ground-Warbler, was documented only from a single juvenile until our recent fieldwork.
As a result, the ‘discovery moment’ was when the researchers saw an adult individual of the known species.
Examination of its DNA was key to differentiating the new ground-warbler once it was spotted in the field.
“When we noted the different plumage coloration between adult birds in the Cordillera and the Sierra Madre in northern Luzon, we sequenced DNA to determine if the plumage differences were individual variation within a species, or if the two plumage forms were also genetically diagnosable,” Hosner said.
Through this analysis, the researchers found that Cordillera and Sierra Madre birds were highly divergent in their DNA, almost as different as the distinctive Bicol Ground-Warbler in southern Luzon.
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Source: Kansas University. Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
MANILA, Philippines – Two new species of frogs were recently discovered by a team of scientists who have been conducting a biodiversity resource assessment in the forests of Southern Leyte.
Authorities said the two forest-obligate species of frogs, which belong to the genus Platymantis, inhabit the mossy forests of the Nacolod Mountain Range in Southern Leyte.
The new species show different body sizes, coloration patterns, and advertisement calls compared to other known species of Philippine Platymantis frogs.
The two species are allied to two different species groups, the Platymantis guentheri group and Platymantis hazelae group.
The scientists said the discovery marks the first time that frogs from the hazelea group were found in Mindanao.
Aldrin Mallari, country director of Fauna and Flora International, stands next to a photo of a red frog, one of two new species of frogs found in the Philippines' Southern Leyte province (AFP)
The new species were unveiled at the Marble Hall of the Museum of the Filipino People on Tuesday.
Guests who attended the event include Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Ramon Paje; deputy head of Mission Federal Republic of Germany Embassy Ralph Timmermann; principal advisor of the International Climate Change projects in the Philippines of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Dr. Bernd-Markus Liss; and director of the National Museum of the Philippines Jeremy Barns.
Flora species
The moth-long biodiversity resource assessment conducted by the team of experts in the municipalities of Silago, Hinunangan, Sogod, Maasin, Tomas Oppus and Malitbog also yielded 229 flora species, 31 of which are unique to the country.
The team also recorded a total of 212 terrestrial vertebrates species, comprising 112 species of birds (41 species are unique to Philippines; 11 of which are threatened to extinction), 36 species of mammals (17 species are unique to the Philippines) and 64 species of amphibians and reptiles (more than half of which are found only in the Philippines)
The findings benefited the local government in its efforts to protect forest ecosystems and establish local forest and biodiversity areas.
It will also spur forest protection and rehabilitation efforts under the Philippine National REDD-Plus Strategy as part of the National Climate Change Action Plan (NCCAPP), and the National Greening Program.
The ground surveys were conducted by a team composed of members from Fauna & FIora International, the National Museum of the Philippines, the Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), and DENR Region 8 on behalf of two projects, namely the Climate relevant modernization of forest policy and Piloting of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) in the Philippines Project by DENR-Forest Management Bureau and the German Development Cooperation – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, and the New Conservation Areas in the Philippines Project (NewCAPP) of the DENR-PAWB, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
Newly-discovered eel species named after Pinoy diver
SHAIRA F. PANELA,
GMA NEWS
April 10, 2012
There are only eleven known species of snake eel in the world —and one of them is named after the Filipino diver who helped scientists identify it.
The new species of snake eel, commonly known as Peri's Snake Eel (Myrichthys paleracio), was named after Christopher “Peri” Paleracio, dive guide at a diving resort in Anilao, Batangas. Paleracio (the person, not the fish), collected the species and submitted it for examination at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2009.
Photo credit: Mark Atwell
The snake eel M. paleracio was first seen in the shallow-water coral reefs of Verde Passage, located between Batangas and Oriental Mindoro.
“Having a snake eel named after me is something. I feel really lucky than honored actually,” said Paleracio.
Peri’s snake eel
According to the International Journal of Ichthyology, published in California, USA, M. paleracio differs from all known Myrichthys in its vivid brown and white coloration; its body elongation; and the number of vertebrae in each segment of its spinal column.
“I’ve been seeing that particular kind of eel for years. I thought that it was just a color variation of the other snake eel that was already identified,” Paleracio said.
Based on studies, M. paleracio is most closely related to the dark-spotted and banded Indo-Pacific species M. maculosu and M. colubrinus, both also occur in shallow water within the Philippines Archipelago. However, none were observed at the locations where M. paleracio was captured.
Internationally-renowned marine scientist Dr. John E. McCosker and Dr. Gerald R. Allen, an expert on the classification and ecology of coral reef fishes in the Indo-Pacific region, received the specimen from Paleracio.
McCosker is a senior scientist and the current chairperson of the Aquatic Biology Department of CAS in the state of California, USA. Allen of Perth, Australia, on the other hand, served as the Western Australian Museum’s Curator of Fishes for 25 years and is now working as a full-time consultant of Conservation International, an organization dedicated to protect the Earth’s richest regions of plant and animal diversity.
Catching and naming the eel
In 2009, when Allen and Roger Steene, also a known Australian underwater explorer and photographer, went for a dive with Paleracio, they realized that the particular snake eel has not yet been identified.
The fish experts decided that the snake eel should be caught for identification.
Paleracio recalled, “I tried catching it with the net that we are using to other fish but this one is not that easy. It is very slippery, and can escape from your grip easily.”
In an effort to catch the snake eel alive, Paleracio had to struggle staying underwater with barely enough air to breathe.
“It was a struggle for me to get it alive. When I caught it, I barely had enough air in my tank to reach the surface,” he said.
In 2011, the California Academy of Sciences arranged its biggest expedition, composed mainly of marine biologists and other fish experts, in the Philippines to find and get the eel. McCosker interviewed Paleracio for the needed data in their study.
McCosker and Allen decided to name the species in honor of Paleracio, as the person who collected the specimen.
Fish and sea slugs guru
Every year, Paleracio also contributes an average of five unidentified species of nudibranch (a form of sea slug). The Philippines has been tagged as the “Center of the Center of Marine Biodiversity” by scientists since 2005, making the country a magnet for marine biodiversity explorers.
Dr. Terry Gosliner, also from CAS, called Paleracio “the best dive guide in the Indo-Pacific” in his book “Indo-Pacific Nudibranchs and Sea Slugs,” published in 2008.
Paleracio is also an avid naturalist and photographer.
MANILA, Philippines—Filipino and American scientists have discovered seven new species of mammals in four locations on the island of Luzon, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced Wednesday.
All forest mice, the newly recognized species were discovered in four mountains in Luzon: Mt Tapulao in Zambales, Mt. Banahaw in Quezon, Mingan Mountains in Aurora and the Sierra Madre Mountain range in northeastern Luzon.
An account of the discovery, authored by nine biologists from the University of the Philippines, the Philippine National Museum, Conservation International-Philippines, the Utah Museum of Natural History and the Florida State University, was first published in last month’s issue of the Fieldiana, the journal of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
“The international community has recognized that our country has among the highest rates of discovery in the world. Filipinos should be aware of such discoveries, to show a collective pride and give a more positive meaning to the expression, ‘only in the Philippines,’” said Environment Secretary Ramon Paje in a statement.
Describing the species in the Fieldiana, project leader Lawrence Heaney said the mammals were “wonderful little mice that live in forested regions high in the mountain… often abundant, [yet] they actively avoid humans and rarely cause any harm. They prefer to eat earthworms and seeds on the forest floor.”
MANILA, Philippines — The bones of an extinct sea cow species that lived about 20 million years ago have been discovered in a cave in the Philippines by a team of Italian scientists, the expedition head said Monday.
Several ribs and spine parts of the aquatic mammal were found in February and March in limestone rock above the waters of an underground river on the island of Palawan, said University of Florence geologist Leonardo Piccini.
“The fossil is in the rock, in the cave. We cannot remove it and we don’t want to extract it. We would like to wait (for) when the technology will allow us to study the fossil without extracting it,” Piccini told Agence France Presse.
Speaking on the sidelines of a symposium at the Philippine presidential palace where the find was announced, Piccini said it was a rare discovery in the region from the Miocene era — 20 million years ago.
“It’s the first remains of this kind of animal in the area, so it is important in reconstructing the habitat and the diffusions of this animal in the Miocene,” he added.
Initial comparisons with fossil specimens suggest it belongs to one of two extinct species of plant-eating sirenia, also known as sea cows, according to research by Federico Panti and Paolo Forti, a member of the Palawan expedition.
They said the animal would have been about 180 centimetres (about six feet) long.
Two sea cow species live to this day, the dugong of the Indo-Pacific region and manatees of the Atlantic basin.
The paper said such fossil finds in the East had been limited to India along with some fragmentary finds in Madagascar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Indonesian island of Java.
“The specimens (found) in the Palawan Island represent the first from the Philippines and the easternmost occurrence in the region,” it added.
It called on the government to protect the area of the find in the Puerto Princesa subterranean river, which is being heavily promoted as a major tourist destination.
