A team of entomologists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University has described 17 new species of the millipede genus Nannaria living in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States and named one of them after U.S. singer and songwriter Taylor Swift.
Nannaria swiftae, male holotype from Van Buren County, Tennessee. Image credit: Hennen et al., doi: 10.3897/zookeys.1096.73485.
Nannaria is an assemblage of small-bodied millipedes distributed in eastern North America.
These millipedes are typically chestnut brown to black with a bimaculate pattern of orange to red, or white spots; uncommonly they may also have stripes.
“These little-known invertebrates have a valuable role as decomposers: breaking down leaf litter, they release their nutrients into the ecosystem,” said lead author Dr. Derek Hennen and his colleagues from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
“They live on the forest floor, where they feed on decaying leaves and other plant matter, and in fact, they are somewhat tricky to catch, because they tend to remain buried in the soil, sometimes staying completely beneath the surface.”
Because of their presence in museum collections, scientists long suspected that Nannaria millipedes included many new species, but these specimens went undescribed for decades.
To fix this, Dr. Hennen and co-authors began a multi-year project to collect new specimens throughout the eastern U.S.
They traveled to 17 U.S. states, checking under leaf litter, rocks, and logs to find species so that they could sequence their DNA and scientifically describe them.
Looking at over 1,800 specimens collected on their field study or taken from university and museum collections, the researchers described 17 new species, including Nannaria marianae (named after Dr. Hennen’s wife) and Nannaria swiftae (named after U.S. singer and songwriter Taylor Swift).
“Nannaria swiftae is only known from Tennessee and has been collected in the following counties: Cumberland, Monroe, and Van Buren,” the authors said.
“This species has been collected in mesic forests with hemlock, maple, oak, tuliptree, witch hazel, and pine, at elevations ranging from 481 m to 1,539 m.”
“he specific name is a noun in the genitive case derived as a matronym, and is named in honor of the artist Taylor Swift, in recognition of her talent as a songwriter and performer and in appreciation of the enjoyment her music has brought the lead author of the study.”
The team’s paper was published in the journal ZooKeys.
_____
D.A. Hennen et al. 2022. A revision of the wilsoni species group in the millipede genus Nannaria Chamberlin, 1918 (Diplopoda, Polydesmida, Xystodesmidae). ZooKeys 1096: 17-118; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.1096.73485
