Astronauts Spent 6 Nights in a Pitch-Black Cave, and Emerged with a Brand-New Species of Crustacean
An international team of astronauts has discovered a new species of blind, colorless, cave-dwelling crustacean — and they didn't even have to leave Earth to find it.
The fingernail-size crustacean, named Alpioniscus sideralis after the Latin word for "stellar," was discovered scuttling about a pitch-black pool in the Sa Grutta cave system below Sardinia, Italy. Fledgling astronauts discovered the tiny cave-dweller while spending six nights belowground as part of the European Space Agency's CAVES training program, which encourages International Space Stationcandidates to conduct research together in perilous subterranean environments.
During a 2012 expedition underground, astronaut trainees from Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and China encountered the tiny, translucent crustaceans in a small cave pond. The astronauts lured the creatures out of the water using a bait of liver and rotten cheese, then transported the specimens back to the surface. [In Images: Creepy, Crawly Cave Creatures]
Molecular analysis showed that A. sideralis' genetics didn't match that of any other species collected from the region, allowing the intrepid astronauts to describe it for the first time in a new study published December 2018 in the journal ZooKeys.