An Australian schoolboy who discovered a new species of jellyfish in a Queensland canal has had the tentacled creature named in his honor, scientists said.
Saxon Thomas was nine when he spotted a small, box-like jellyfish while fishing with a friend in 2013. Thinking it unusual, he removed it from the water with a net and with help of his father sent it to Queensland Museum.
“We looked at it and we confirmed it was a new species, so we named a new species after him,” Merrick Ekins of the museum said on Thursday. “We thought about it and we thought: ‘Why don’t we highlight the fact that a young, keen, observant lad saw it, and recognized this as interesting and thought that he should contact the museum.’”
Photo: AFP
Ekins said three different specimens were found of the small jellyfish, which has a bell measuring about 3cm to 4cm and tentacles stretching much longer.
“It’s got a whole lot of scientific characteristics which make it unique,” he said of the species named Chiropsella saxoni, also known as the pygmy box jellyfish.
The much larger major box jellyfish, named for its box-like body, has extremely fast-acting venom in its tentacles and can kill within minutes.
“We don’t think this one is deadly because no one has ever turned up dying from it and it’s rare, but that doesn’t mean it won’t give someone a very nasty shock,” Ekins said.
He said while new species were rare for birds and mammals, there were “lots of jellyfish that are totally undescribed out there.”
“A lot of people think that everything in the ocean has already been discovered, but it hasn’t. In terms of things in the ocean, there are thousands of things waiting to be discovered,” he said.
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