translated from Spanish: New lineage of Lapa Bears name in honor of the Yagan people

The species of Nacella, known in the region of Magallanes as Lapas or Mauchos, live associated with rocks and macro LGAs where they feed on diatoms and bacteria.
They are distributed in different provinces of the Southern Ocean, including South America, Antarctic Peninsula and geographically isolated sub-antarctic islands. There they play an important ecological role in the diet of some animals, for example, penguins.
A study, published in the prestigious journal Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society and led by the scientist of the Center for Dynamic research of high latitude Ecosystems (IDEAL) of the Austral University of Chile (UACh), the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB) and the Antarctic Rings GAB, Claudio González-Wevar, discovered a new species that constitutes a new lineage of Nacella.
Ten years of research
After more than ten years of research, which included analysis of distribution data, morphology and evolutionary relationships of all species of the group, the investigator carried out a complete review of the genus Nacella.
After sampling along the Beagle channel, in the intertidal sectors of the PIA and Garibaldi fjords, specimens of Lapas were collected that were initially identified as Nacella Flammea, one of the four Patagonian species living from Puerto Montt at Cape Horn.
However, the most finished genetic-molecular and morphological analyses yielded a completely different result. The scientist and his team discovered that it was a lineage that had not been described before in the scientific literature. In honor of one of the native peoples of the region of Magellan and Chilean Antarctica, he decided to baptize him as Nacella Yaghana.
Tribute
“It is a tribute to the canoeists peoples,” explains González-Wevar and adds that “Nacella’s latest revision dates back to the year 1973 and was carried out by researcher Neozelándes A.W.P. Powell.
From this point of view, this new study is a contribution to the knowledge of the Southern Ocean biota and represents an advance in the knowledge of one of the most known groups of invertebrates of the Southern Ocean.
The exemplary type of Nacella Yaghana, on the basis of which the description of the species was made, will soon be delivered to the Museum of Natural History of Chile.
This research is part of an international collaborative network involving Tomoyuki Nakano, Japan, Hamish Spencer, New Zealand, and Thomas Saucède of France, along with Chilean researchers Sebastián Rosenfeld (UMAG), Elie Poulin ( University of Chile, IEB) and Mathias Hüne (Ichthyologic Foundation).

Original source in Spanish