New turtle species found
Scientists say they’ve found a new species of turtle in the Pearl
River, and they’ve named it, aptly enough, the Pearl map turtle.
For a long time, scientists believed the Pascagoula map turtle was
alone in the Pascagoula and Pearl rivers. That changed with the findings
by Jeff Lovich and Josh Ennen, both with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Pearl map turtle is 57th turtle species native to the United
States and the 13th map turtle. Twenty-nine species can be found in
Mississippi.
Lovich’s research in 1992 led to his discovery of the Pascagoula map
turtle and the Escambia map turtle, which is found in the Escambia River
system. He told The Mississippi Press that he had noticed “very subtle
differences between the turtles that lived in the Pearl and Pascagoula”
rivers while doing research in the 1990s.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll leave those for somebody else to work out,”’
he said.
That somebody was Ennen, who works for Lovich at the USGS Southwest
Biological Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz. Ennen discovered the Pearl
map turtle while doing research on map turtle species for his doctorate
at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Lovich said Ennen called him and said new genetic data showed
differences between the Pascagoula and Pearl map turtles.
“The differences between the turtles in the Pearl and Pascagoula were
significant and he wanted to know if I wanted to team up with him and
run my analyses based on color pattern, measurements of the shell and
those sorts of things and combine the data with his new genetic
information based on DNA and we did that,” Lovich said.
“The results were clear. They were definitely different species,”
Lovich said.
Lovich said the United States is a “turtle hot spot as far as
biodiversity. The only countries that have turtles with the same
biodiversity would be places like China and India.”
- Fox news |