A tiny shrimp, new to science, lives in just five streams on one island

In the streams of Tongguling National Nature Reserve, on China's Hainan Island, lives a shrimp no one had ever formally recorded. It is small and translucent with a reddish-brown tint — males reach barely four millimetres across the back, females a little bigger. A two-year survey of the reserve's streams and ditches, from 2022 to 2024, showed it is a species entirely new to science, now named Caridina tonggulinensis in the journal Zoosystematics and Evolution. It appears to live nowhere else on Earth but inside this one reserve, in five short streams within a 44-square-kilometre home. Unlike its closest cousins, whose young drift out to sea, this shrimp spends its whole life in fresh water — each female carrying about 30 relatively large eggs. The research team says the shrimp deserves high conservation priority, with monitoring to come. Naming a creature is the first step to not losing it.

SDG 15 · Life on land