American
university biologist discovers new crab Species
November 2012. A tiny new species of hermit crab, Areopaguristes tudgei, has
been discovered on the barrier reef off the coast of Belize by Christopher
Tudge, a biology professor at American University in Washington, D.C.
Tudge,
despite many years of research, has, until now, never had a species named after
him. He only found out about his namesake after reading an article about it in
the journal Zootaxa. Apparently, finding out after-the-fact is standard
practice in the highly formalized ritual of naming a new species.
The
two crustacean taxonomists and authors of the paper who named the new crab
after Tudge, Rafael Lemaitre of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and Darryl L.
Felder of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette's Department of Biology
Laboratory for Crustacean Research, have known Tudge since he first came to
Washington in 1995 as a postdoc research fellow at the Smithsonian.
Years
of research
Lemaitre and Felder have been collecting specimens on the tiny Belizean island
for decades and for more than 10 years, they had asked Tudge-who specializes in
the structures of crustacean reproduction and how they relate to the creatures'
evolutionary history-to join them on one of their semiannual research outings.
Finally, in February 2010, Tudge joined them on a tiny island covered with
hundreds of species of their favourite fauna.
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