Sometimes, a collection of new species turns out to be… no new species!

Takahiro Sugiyama, Ryutaro Goto, and Chloé Fourreau began studying the unique ectoparasitic scale worm Gastrolepidia clavigera in part because of its fascinating diversity of color, likely contributing to its ability to camouflage on sea cucumbers. After some genetic work, they found that this entire rainbow of scale worms all actually seem to belong to the same species!

Takahiro Sugiyama, Ryutaro Goto, and Chloé Fourreau’s paper “Host specific camouflage in a holothurian-ectoparasitic scale worm: testing the host-race hypothesis using COI and genome-wide SNP data” is in volume 173 of Marine Biology

It can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-025-04744-y

Episode image credit: Takahiro Sugiyama and Ryutaro Goto

A New Species episode with Chloé on Polychaete worms: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aH2bPNb4u3wOrONIYfZkp?si=7i0lzzSlSjWfsXce436-3g

Follow Chloé on instagram and Bluesky: @chaoticchloeia

Follow the MISE lab on instagram: @mise_lab

Read Takahiro’s recent paper about the scale worms that live on sea stars: doi.org/10.3800/pbr.15.289

Original description of G. clavigera: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/50342#page/8/mode/1up

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Music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom)

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