Rio Negro Shrimp Research Shows Amazonian Diversity

Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

The vast area of Amazonia is one of Earth’s most biologically diverse environments. That diversity has attracted many scientists and countless studies. But sometimes it still feels as though we are just scratching at the surface. There are extensive gaps in our knowledge and we can still only guess at the real number of species that exist there.

Now, a new study, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, reveals how little we know about that Amazonian diversity.

Since the first half of the last century, there has been a long-running scientific debate about the validity of two species of freshwater shrimp.

Until now, specialists in crustacean biology have argued about the exact taxonomy of the species in question. Some crustacean experts thought that one species, first described in 1950 using shrimps from Bolivia with the scientific name Palaemon ivonicus, might actually be the same species that was first discovered in 1935 in Guyana and named Palaemon carteri. Other crustacean scientists, however, believed that they were entirely separate species.

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