BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
In February 2024, sixteen scientists gathered at the University of Lodz in Poland, surrounded by snow, to spend a week examining creatures from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
The animals they were studying lived at depths of around 13,000 feet (roughly 4,000 meters), in near-total darkness, in a stretch of ocean between Hawaii and Mexico called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. They were amphipods, shrimp-like organisms about one centimeter long, and none of them had ever been formally named. That was the whole point of the workshop. To name them.
Why naming matters
Taxonomy, the scientific process of identifying, describing, and classifying species, exists as its own discipline for a reason. A species that has not been formally named cannot be cited in research, cannot be listed as threatened or endangered, and cannot be included in conservation or policy frameworks.
“Until they are properly named for science in this official way, they are not communicable about,” says Tammy Horton of the National Oceanography Centre, one of the lead researchers. “It absolutely gives them a passport to be discussed, to be talked about, to be conserved.”
Dr. Anna Żażdżewska of the University of Lodz, who co-led the project, described naming a species as offering it “a passport for living.”
The team published 24 new species in the journal ZooKeys on March 24, along with two new genera and, perhaps most dramatically, an entirely new family and superfamily of crustaceans. A new superfamily is a new branch on the evolutionary tree.
“To find a new superfamily is incredibly exciting, and very rarely happens,” Horton said. She compared the discovery to finding dogs in a world where science had only catalogued bears and cats. She called it the most exciting find of her career.
The names they chose
The naming choices say something about the people behind them. Mirabestia maisie, the type species for the new superfamily, was named after Horton’s daughter. Byblis hortonae and Byblisoides jazdzewskae honored the lead researchers. Thrombasia ania carried a form of Żażdżewska’s first name. Eperopeus vermiculatus was named for the World Register of Marine Species. Lepidepecreum myla was named after a video game character.
And then there is Pseudolepechinella apricity. The word “apricity” refers to the warmth of winter sun on a cold day. Horton chose it for the atmosphere of the workshop itself: sixteen scientists from eight institutions, working together in a Polish February. “It was very apt,” she said, “as we discussed our findings in the warmth of the February sun amid the snow of the Polish winter in Lodz.”
The timing
Before this study, only 13 amphipod species had been formally described from the entire Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Scientists estimate more than 5,500 species exist in the region, with roughly 90 percent still unnamed.
The zone also sits atop large deposits of manganese nodules, formations rich in nickel, cobalt, and copper used in battery technology and renewable energy infrastructure. In January 2026, U.S. regulators changed rules to accelerate deep-sea mining permits. In March 2026, an application was accepted to begin mining more than 25,000 square miles of the same region.
Following machinery tests in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in 2022, species abundance dropped 37 percent and biodiversity fell by nearly a third within two months, according to sediment analysis by the UK Natural History Museum.
“We’ve just done 24,” Horton noted, “and that is a drop in the ocean, literally, of how many more we have to describe.”
Source study: ZooKey’s — New deep-sea Amphipoda from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone: 24 new species described under the Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative: One Thousand Reasons campaign
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