New sundew species found using social media

New sundew species found using social media

Species of the Drosera microphylla complex. © Thilo Krueger/ Curtin University

The sundew is a relatively species-rich carnivorous plant. Six new species have now been added to one of their species complexes. The special thing about it: Four of these six sundew species discovered in Western Australia were tracked down using the internet and social media. It was only the photos posted there by amateur nature photographers that put the biologists on the trail of this new species.

Although we are in a time of worldwide species extinction, at the same time many animal and plant species are still undiscovered. Exploring this hidden diversity is therefore a race against time – without the intensive work of species researchers, many creatures would become extinct without ever having been recognized beforehand. But new animal and plant species are not only discovered on research trips and expeditions to unknown regions or in scientific collections. An increasing number of new species are now being discovered by experts online, in photo databases or on social media.

Carnivorous sundew in view

Among the species found with the help of the internet and amateur scientists are several carnivorous plants. With their often striking appearance and their scary and fascinating prey-catching strategies, they arouse the curiosity of many people and are therefore often photographed. This in turn means that biologists often come across photos of still unknown plant species on the Internet by accident. For example, the largest sundew in South America – Drosera magnifica – was only identified through pictures on Facebook. In the meantime, nature lovers and amateur scientists have already provided more data in social media and online databases than research collections.

Now the Internet has also helped with another species discovery. For their study, Thilo Krueger’s team at Curtin University in Australia wanted to look for new species of sundew, a carnivorous plant that catches its prey with numerous droplets of sticky mucus. Insects stick to these droplets and are then digested by the curling leaves. One of the sundew species found in Australia, Drosera microphylla, has long been suspected to be in fact a complex of several species. Based on significantly different flower colors and fine details in the leaf shape and flower structures, botanists have actually identified three different variants within this sundew group in recent years.

Nine types instead of just three

Krueger and his team now wanted to know whether there might be other unrecognized members of the Drosera microphylla species complex. To do this, they undertook several field research tours in southwest Australia, and also evaluated entries on the citizen science platform iNaturalist and in social media. And indeed they found what they were looking for: among the photos posted by Australian amateur botanists and nature photographers, the team came across previously unknown locations of already known sundew species. During their fieldwork in Western Australia, the researchers also found two new species of Drosera microphylla.

On the other hand, however, the searches on the Internet proved to be extremely successful: Krueger and his colleagues discovered four previously completely unknown species of this sundew group with the help of photos and entries that Australian lay scientists and amateur nature photographers had published on the Internet. “We can now establish that the Drosera microphylla complex comprises nine different species – three times as many as was previously known,” the biologists state. In her view, this also underscores the importance of amateurs in exploring biodiversity: “The research data from citizen scientists is a valuable data source for us biodiversity researchers – and is therefore of great importance for the protection of many animal and plant species,” says senior author Andreas Fleischmann from the Munich State Botanical Collection. “In particular, it would not have been possible for us to determine the distribution areas of very rare species without this additional wealth of data.”

Source: State Natural Science Collections of Bavaria; Specialist article: Biology, doi: 10.3390/biology12010141

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