A new species of Pennellid Copepod from the East China Sea.

Pennellid Copepods are small parasitic Crustaceans that live with their bodies almost entirely buried within the bodies of Fish or Whale hosts, with only the egg sacks and the tip of the abdomen visible from the exterior. Like many parasites their bodies have become much reduced, and do not obviously resemble those of other Copepods, or even other Crustaceans.

In a paper published in the journal ZooKeys on 29 November 2012, Daisuke Uyeno of the Faculty of Science at the University of the Ryukyus, Kaori Wakabayashi of the Faculty of Marine Science at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and Kazuya Nagasawa of the Graduate School of Biosphere Science at Hiroshima University, describe a new species of Pennellid Copepod from Rattails (Grenadiers) from the East China Sea.

The new species is placed in the genus Sarcotretes, which mainly infects mid- and deepwater benthic Fish, and given the specific name umitakae, in honour of the Umitaka-maru, a training and research vessel of the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. Sarcotretes umitakae was found infecting Rattails (Grenadiers) of the species Coelorinchus jordani (a deepwater Fish related to Cod and Hake) off the Tokara Islands in the East China Sea. The species is described from three female specimens, the male being unknown.

 

 (A) Two specimens of the Rattail Coelorinchus jordani infected with Sarcotretes umitakae. Scale bar is 20 mm. (B) Detail of Sarcotretes umitakae. Scale bar is 3 mm. Uyeno et al. (2012).

 

Line drawing of  Sarcotretes umitakae showing the entire animal. Scale bar is 3 mm.  Uyeno et al. (2012).

See also A new species of Sponge dwelling Pontoniine Shrimp from Sabah State, Malaysia, 3D images of a Cretaceous Mantis Shrimp, Two new species of Amphipod Crustacean from the Gulf of Thailand, Four new species of parasitic Copepods from Japan and New species of Grenadier from Japan.

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Eruption on Suwanosejima.

The Tokyo Volcanic Ash Advisory Center reported that a 1.5 km ash plume was sighted over Suwanosejima on 3 July 2013. Such events are frequent on Suwanosejima, a sparsely inhabited 8 km volcanic island in the Tokara Archipelago, though it is the first such event observed this year. The volcano is one of Japan's most active, and has caused the island to be abandoned on a number of occasions.

A smaller column over Suwanosejima in April 2011. Wikimeda Commons.

Suwanosejima is essentially a single giant stratovolcano, with four craters arranged in a line from the centre of the island, nine kilometers southwest to within a kilometer of the sea. The northeasternmost of these craters is the highest, at 799 m, and the most active, though there are occasional eruptions from the other craters. The island is about 200 km south of Kagoshima, mainland Japan's most southerly city, and has a population of about 50, including a commune run by the Buzuko counter-culture group. 

The Tokara Archipelago form part of the Ryukyu Island Arc, which sits on top of the boundary between the Eurasian and Philippine Plates. The Philippine Plate is being subducted beneath the Eurasian Plate, in the Ryukyo Trench, to the Southeast of the Islands. As it is drawn into the interior of the Earth, the tectonic plate is partially melted by the heat of the Earth's interior, and liquid magma rises up through the overlying Eurasian Plate to form the volcanos of the Ryukyu Islands and Kyushu.

The location of Suwanosejima. Google Maps.

See also Eruption on Tori-shima, Magnitude 6.0 Earthquake in southern Japan, Magnitude 7.3 Earthquake off the coast of Japan, Japan shaken by pair of major Earthquakes and Earthquake shakes Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan.

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