The tropical biodiversity journal Avicennia has published a scientific paper describing a new marine species in the waters of Puerto del Carmen, which has been named Lomanotus tias. The etymology is “dedicated to the municipality of Tías for its commitment” to the conservation of the Cagafrecho Special Area of Conservation through the ZEConsciente project.
The paper, signed by Jesús Ortea and Leopoldo Moro, of the BOS department at the University of Oviedo and of the Biodiversity Service of the Government of the Canary Islands, singles out the municipality of Tías for its commitment to publicising and raising awareness of the importance of conserving this area. It adds that in Tías (Puerto del Carmen) “we have discovered nine of our new species, the first of them in 1982 and the most recent in this study”.
According to the scientific paper, the newly described species is a sea slug or mollusc “of the genus Lomanotus Verany, 1844, based on two 2 mm specimens collected alive on the shallow rocky shore of the island of Lanzarote. The red cerata in each of the dorsal series, the smooth caruncle and the jaws, with a smooth plate outside the hooks of the cutting edge, are the main distinguishing features of this new species, which is also the first of the genus in the Canary Islands”.
The text explains that “to date, and despite the regular and continuous sampling carried out over more than 40 years to inventory the sea slugs of the Canary archipelago, no species of the genus Lomanus Verany, 1844 had ever been collected, the only reference in Macaronesia being the description of Lomanotus draconis Ortea & Cabrera, 1999, based on 1 specimen of 8 mm collected at Praia Estoril, on the island of Boavista, Cape Verde, on stones with hydrozoans on a sandy bottom”.
The material examined in Lanzarote consists of two specimens measuring 2 and 1.8 mm long by 1 mm wide, collected on 21 November 2022 along with egg masses on hydrozoans at a depth of 6 metres among turf-forming red algae with sediment.
The paper describes this find in the waters of Puerto del Carmen as “surprising and unexpected” and stresses that “it is a good example of the usefulness of regular, continuous sampling through Citizen Science, an initiative promoted by the Canary Islands Marine Environment Observers Network (RedPROMAR)”. The material studied was collected by Dennis Rabelling (Euro-Divers Lanzarote), a RedPROMAR collaborator.