New kingdom of eukaryotes discovered on a hike near Halifax
November 16, 2018 12:36 PM   Subscribe

Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that doesn't fit into the plant, animal, or any other kingdom of known organisms. Two species of the microscopic organisms, called hemimastigotes, were found in dirt collected on a whim during a hike in Nova Scotia by Dalhousie University graduate student Yana Eglit. Hemimastigotes were first seen and described in the 19th century, and about 10 species have been described over the past 100 years. But up to now, no one could figure out how they fit into the evolutionary tree of life. Based on the Dalhousie lab's new genetic analysis, it looks like you'd have to go back a billion years before you could find a common ancestor of hemimastigotes and any other known living thing.

The researchers discovered one new species of the flagellar eukaryotes, which they named Hemimastix kukwesjijk after Kukwes, a greedy, hairy ogre from the mythology of the local Mi'kmaq people (the suffix 'jijk' means 'little'). After observing it hunting aquatic microbes, Eglit reared its prey in captivity so she could feed and breed captive Hemimastix.
posted by heatherlogan (24 comments total) 59 users marked this as a favorite
 
Direct link to the Nature article (subscription required)
posted by heatherlogan at 12:42 PM on November 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Whee, yet another kingdomdomain supra-kingdom in the big treebushhairbrushmyceliumbramble of life!

And, they're cute!
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:21 PM on November 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


Is this a true new kingdom, or just another weirdo microorganism to throw in that big phylogenetic slop bucket named "Protista?"
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:29 PM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


protists are a paraphyletic group that don’t appear in cladistic models based on common ancestry. these things could probably be lumped as protists but their ancestry is farther removed from most other things in that bucket than those things are from each other
posted by murphy slaw at 1:35 PM on November 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


That’s gonna make one helluva job market paper.
posted by vorpal bunny at 2:23 PM on November 16, 2018 [12 favorites]


Pretty.
posted by bongo_x at 2:49 PM on November 16, 2018


Direct link to the Nature article (subscription not required)
posted by Nelson at 2:52 PM on November 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


WOW. Biology kinda freaks me out!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:49 PM on November 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


I was just about to say: how do we eat it?
posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:01 PM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I didn't realize how good the CBC's science reporting is.
posted by jamjam at 4:05 PM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Protista is much less of a "slop bucket" since the development of molecular biology and highly efficient methods to analyze entire genomes for their family "fingerprint." It's at the point where if you can cultivate a species and get a good sample, you have a very good idea of what family it belongs to, or where the branch should go if it's a new family. Cultivating a species is the hard part, and depending on the method of counting fingerprints, the fast majority of single-celled species have never been cultivated (obligate parasites, symbiotic relationships, or really exotic ecological niches). As my undergrad mentor said, "we know almost everything about what they do in a petri dish, and very little about what's going on in dirt." I think there are methods to do this kind of analysis on extremely small samples, but obviously it's easier to replicate results if you can share your cute little ogres.

So according to wikipedia there's five supergroups of eukaryotes. I think this would make six. And the more families we find within a clade, the better we are at asking questions like "how did we domesticate our pet mitochondria?" and "why do we have so much 'junk' DNA?" And the observation that their cute little flagella behave differently might be interesting.

Oh, and they're cute little vampiric ogres from the pictures, like cytoplasm sucking paramecium.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:29 PM on November 16, 2018 [8 favorites]


I confess that I imagined this might be a reference to the Ford brothers, but it turned out to be much more attractive organisms.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:07 PM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is very interesting, and thanks for locating a free download of the letter.

I am quite pleased this is microscopic vs. a hundred feet tall and striding ashore somewhere in New England. Because the idea of a blob with living harpoons that sucks the insides out of its prey seems kind of the opposite of "cute" to me.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 6:30 PM on November 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


People interested in this sort of thing I would highly recommend Nick Lane's The Vital Question, which has a bit about the origin of life but is mostly about the origin of eurkaryotes. Lane is a great writer and also an active biochemist. He emphasizes how similar all eukaryotes are, with cytoskeleton, sexual reproduction, endoplasmic reticulum, etc., all in the ur-ancestor before they branched into plants, animals, fungus, etc.

I was surprised as a space alien would have been upon being told that, even though panda bears have nothing to do with bears, a Havanese and a greyhound are in fact the same species. But given the last common ancestor date whatever the hell these things are probably belong to our same close family of organisms.

It's still the bacteria and archaea that are freaks and shouldn't be invited to our family reunion.
posted by mark k at 8:19 PM on November 16, 2018


mostly about the origin of eurkaryotes

Wow, that phrase made a 25-year-old memory of SimEarth milestone music pop into my head.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:39 PM on November 16, 2018 [10 favorites]


even though panda bears have nothing to do with bears

Huh? Pandas are ursidae, their closest relative is the spectacled bear.
posted by tavella at 11:17 PM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Maybe mark k means red pandas? Or koala "bears"?
posted by lollusc at 4:37 AM on November 17, 2018


It's still the bacteria and archaea that are freaks and shouldn't be invited to our family reunion.

Hey hey, someone has to make the cheese.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:42 AM on November 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think it's probably koalas. I personally conflate koalas and pandas into a single "fluffy, fussy and overrated" category.
posted by howfar at 8:24 AM on November 17, 2018


I appreciate everyone trying to suss out a plausible train of thought where my analogy was a good one. But I don't know myself this morning. I'm pretty sure a koala was floating around in my brain at some point but it's still pretty hopeless.

Nick Lane's books are still good though

posted by mark k at 11:27 AM on November 17, 2018


If the researcher accidentally stumbled across 2 of these creatures in a sample of dirt, have they tried again? Was it truly a 1 in a million find (as the article tone seems to suggest)? If I cultivated a handful of dirt from my garden would I also find never-before-seen creatures?
posted by leo_r at 1:21 PM on November 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


If I cultivated a handful of dirt from my garden would I also find never-before-seen creatures?

I'm not an expert here, but my understanding is that never before seen but closely related to familiar organisms are not too difficult to find. Never before seen and only distantly related to known organisms is much harder. The addition of "and we figured out how to cultivate them in the lab" is the cherry on top - a lot of microscopic soil organisms are difficult to cultivate because they depend on other organisms being present for something or other, but it's tough to figure out what.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:49 PM on November 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is a cool story, but the difficulty the author has in communicating why it's cool also makes clear how limited lay education about biological diversity is (and also how much work we make the word 'microbe' do in pop science writing). If everything a reader knows about eukaryotes was based on 20th century taxonomy, it is likely pretty difficult to understand. Wikipedia has got the basics. Eukaryotes are divided into multiple suprakingdoms. We don't entirely know the relationship among those suprakingdoms. Fungi and animals are two components of the suprakingdom Opisthokonta. Plants are just one branch within Archaeplastida.

Like a lot of you, my students coming straight from high school (educated entirely in the 21st century) still think in the 20th century way that eukaryotic classification is into the kingdoms Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, and Protista. They may have even heard prokaryotes called Monera and may have never heard of Archaea. I know it can be daunting to tell people that everything they know about classification is wrong, and I guess we always run the risk of people dismissing science because our understanding changes over time, but everything they know about classification is wrong because our understanding changes over time, and we've had a big shift.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:49 PM on November 18, 2018 [3 favorites]




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