A previously unknown species of crustacean and two previously unknown species of annelid worms have been discovered during a cave dive near Lanzarote in the Canary Islands off the coast of northern Africa. The discoveries were made by a team of international scientists and cave divers exploring the Tunnel de la Atlantida – the longest submarine lava tube in the world.

The crustacean belongs to the genus Speleonectes in the class Remipedia, while the annelid worms are members of the class Polychaeta.

The crustacean has been named Speleonectes atlantida, after the cave system in which it lives. It looks a lot like its close relative Speleonectes ondinae which was discovered in the same lava tube in 1985. The two crustaceans may have diverged into separate species some 20,000 years ago after the Monte Corona volcano had erupted, forming the famous six-kilometre long lava tube.

Until quite recently, the class Remipedia was unknown to science. The first member of this class was found in 1979 by divers exploring a marine system in the Bahamas archipelago. Since then, 22 Remipedia species have been named and described. Most of them live in Central America, from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico through the north-eastern Caribbean. However, two species are instead found in caves in Lanzarote and Western Australia. The existence of these wayward species puzzles the scientists, since it is assumed that these small eyeless cave-dwellers would not be able to simply swim from the Caribbean to West Africa and Western Australia. One theory suggests that this class might be a very old crustacean group that was already widespread 200 million years ago. If this is true, the two species living off Lanzarote became isolated from the Caribbean group by the formation of the Atlantic Ocean.

As mentioned above, members of the class Remipedia live in dark submarine caves and have no eyes. Instead, they find their way around using long antennae. The heads of these predatory crustaceans are equipped with prehensile limbs and poisonous fangs.

The results of the lava cave exploration will be published in a special issue of the Springer journal Marine Biodiversity in September 2009.

The cave exploration team consisted of scientists from Texas A&M University and Pennsylvania State University in the USA, the University of La Laguna in Spain, and the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover and the University of Hamburg, both in Germany.

In a recent issue of the journal Zootaxa, researchers Gertrud Konings-Dudin, Adrianus Konings and Jay Stauffer have described and named three new species of cichlid from the genus Melanochromis; two of them being fairly widespread among aquarists keeping African cichlids.

All three species hail from the eastern shore of Lake Malawi and belong to the group commonly referred to as Mbuna cichlids among fish keepers.

The fish you may have been offered under the name Melanochromis sp. “northern blue” (picture here) has been given the full name Melanochromis kaskazini. Just like its old trade name suggests, this Malawi cichlid hails from the northern part of the lake and the word kaskazini was choosen since it is the Kiswahili word for “northern”. (Kiswahili, also known as Swahili, is an African language spoken along the continent’s eastern coast.)

The “blue” part of its old trade name is a reference to the colour of the males; they are cobalt blue, while the females are white with a yellow or orange anal fin. Melanochromis kaskazini looks quite similar to its close relative Melanochromis lepidiadaptes but the latter one sports a suit of mensural characters not seen in Melanochromis kaskazini.

The Mbuna cichlid previously sold in fish stores as Melanochromis sp. “auratus elongate” (picture here) is from now named Melanochromis mossambiquensis. The fish is named after the country Mazambique since it is found along the Mazambique shore of Lake Malawi; a lake shared between the countries Mazambique, Malawi and Tanazania.

In Melanochromis mossambiquensis, the female fish is adorned with yellow stripes on the belly and a midlateral and dorsolateral black stripe that is narrower than the submarginal black band in the dorsal fin. The yellow stripes do not cover the entire lower abdomen, and the caudal fin features black spotting. The male fish is brown/black with white dorsolateral and midlateral stripes, and he displays a suite of mensural characters.

The third Mbuna cichlid, which does not have any trade name, has been given the scientific name Melanochromis wochepa due to its small size. Wochepa means “small” in Chinyanja, also known as Chichewa, a Bantu language spoken in south-central Africa.  I have not been able to find a picture at this time.

Melanochromis wochepa males are blue without any white striping, while the females sport a submarginal dorsal band that is wider than the mid-lateral and the dorsolateral stripe, thin abdominal yellow stripes never covering the entire lower abdomen, and a suite of mensural characters. The vomer is steep-angled in both sexes.

For more information, see paper published in Zootaxa: Konings-Dudin, G, AF Konings and JR, Jr Stauffer (2009) Descriptions of three new species of Melanochromis (Teleostei: Cichlidae) and a redescription of M. vermivorus. Zootaxa 2076, pp. 37–59.