Researcher discovers new animal species via social media

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Would you have recognized them?

Retweet mites in their natural habitat

Photo: Yuito Obae / dpa

The Twitter mite is followed by the retweet mite: for the second time, a researcher from Austria has discovered a previously unknown species of mite with the help of a post on a social network.

Biologist Tobias Pfingstl recently published the first scientific description of a small animal living in Japan, which he has named Ameronothrus retweet - in German retweet mite.

Mites – which include ticks – are arachnids.

Last year, with the help of Japanese Twitter users, the 44-year-old researcher from the University of Graz discovered a new species of mite, which he dubbed the Twitter mite (Ameronothrus twitter) (here the scientific description of the little animal in PDF format).

A nature lover had photographed the arachnid on the coast near Tokyo and published one of his photos on Twitter.

A scientist from Hosei University in the Japanese capital discovered the post and informed the mite expert Pfingstl.

He, in turn, found that the specimen shown in the photo was a previously unknown species.

Shortly thereafter, another Japanese user posted a photo of mites on a rocky beach near Tottori and asked online if this was the newly discovered species.

Pfingstl had specimens of the almost one-millimeter-long creatures sent to Austria and came to the conclusion that another unknown species was present.

This is how the retweet mite got its name.

Retweeting is the dissemination of an online post on Twitter.

So far, according to Pfingstl, only a handful of animal and plant species have been seen for the first time with the help of social media.

"There's still a lot to discover," he said.

Around 50,000 mite species are currently known, but 100 to 200 new ones are added every year.

mak/dpa