Page 69 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #12

First discovered by cave lamplighter Luka
ˇ
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Cec, the beetle was passed on to Count Franz
Josef von Hochenwart – who was creating a
guidebook to the caves – who passed it on
to beetle expert Ferdinand Schmidt.
“It did not take long for Schmidt to
realise this was a true troglobite,” explains
Katja Dolenc Batagelj from Postojna Cave
management. “The scientific circles were
thrilled by the discovery and, because of
the beetle and further discoveries, Postojna
Cave became known as the cradle of a
new science – speleobiology, the study of
subterranean animals.”
Clockwise from von Valvasor, when
New discoveries above: slenderneck the species was
beetles get their discovered after
The slenderneck beetle is referred to as the soft brown colour being washed out
first troglobite to be labelled as such, because from the chitin in into the open by
it was described in reference to its habitat. their exoskeletons; high waters; a
When olms were first scientifically described Adelsberger translucent, white
stalactite cave, isopod walks along
by Josephus Nicolaus Luarenti in 1768, the
depicted about the wet walls of an
olms had been found outside of caves, when 1875; olms were underground cavity.
they had been washed out by high waters. first described as Depigmentation is
The slenderneck beetle also exhibits a early as 1689 by typical in troglobites
Johann Weichard living in darkness.
number of adaptations for its cave-dwelling
lifestyle. Like the olm, it has an extended
lifespan compared to its surface-dwelling
relatives and is also eyeless. It lacks any
pigment, with its brown colour coming from
the chitin in its exoskeleton. Its elongated
antennae and tiny sensory hairs help it to
move around the cave and, as it doesn’t need
Cave, teeth, calcium & isopod; Marco Colombo/calosoma.it; illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty beetle: Alex Hyde/NPL; olms: Alex Hyde; black olm; Daniel Heuclin/NPL
to fly, its elytra, or wing-cases, are fused
together to create a dome, which allows it
to regulate moisture.
Around the world, cave divers and
scientists are continuing to discover new
species. In 1981, after advances in cave scuba
gear enabled divers to penetrate flooded caves
in the Bahamas, Dr Jill Yager described a new
class of crustaceans – the remipedes. Blind
creatures thought to be more closely related
to insects than any of the other crustaceans,
remipedes inhabit coastal aquifers filled with
saline groundwater and are named after their Light and shade
legs, with Remipedia derived from the Latin
for ‘oar-footed’. The olm is renowned for being a pale (P. a. anguinus). Its head is slightly
Yager and her colleagues were among creature lacking skin pigmentation. shorter, with strong jaw muscles, and
the first to dive and explore the Lucayan However, not all olms are the same. In it has shorter legs. Though its body
Caverns, gradually adding to the maps with fact, there is one recognised subspecies, length is slightly longer (it has 34–35
every dive. During these dives, Yager noticed Proteus anguinus parkelj, the black vertebrae compared to 29–32 in the
small creatures in the water, including one olm, which can be dark brown as well nominate subspecies), its tail is shorter,
that looked like marine polychaetes, a group as black. Discovered in 1986, the black in proportion.
of annelids known as bristle worms. Upon olm is restricted to an area smaller than In addition, rather than having
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realising that it was a crustacean, she tried 100sq km near Crnomelj in Slovenia. completely regressed eyes, the eyes of
to identify it but without success. “I wrote As well as having pigmentation, the black olm develop almost normally,
letters, as there was no internet back in the black olm has a number of other and have principal rods, and both red-
those days, and sent drawings to a few cave diferences to the nominate subspecies sensitive and blue-sensitive cones.
biologists but nobody could help,” she says.
“Eventually, I realised that it had to be a new
class of animals. It was really exciting for me
to be able to describe these amazing animals.
It was especially significant because I was

December 2018