People find great satisfaction in labels: being able to refer to something as something, a type of something and a member of the set of somethings. Thus we find ourselves with the number google, the colour peacock, and identity crises over being a Millennial or a Zoomer. But when it comes to organisms, the need …
One thousand, two hundred and fifteen years ago, upon the slope of a volcano in the Aomori prefecture of Japan, a shrine was built. Beside that shrine, a small pool was made from a natural spring, providing a water source for visitors to the shrine and their horses. These features would be maintained for 1000 years, a sanctuary for a tiny shrimp whose world had turned inhospitable.
In 1901, John Tunney collected an animal he didn’t recognise. He sent it off to his benefactor in the UK, where the specimen joined thousands of other items as part of the famous Rothschild collection, and disappeared from all knowledge. Until two centuries later, when researchers at the British Museum of Natural History rediscovered Tunney’s …
Novel Ecology 