A pale, blind creature that never leaves its home in a deep, dark cave in Brazil—a new species of arachnid—has been named for the Smeagol character in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
The new daddy longlegs species has been named Iandumoema smeagol, and like the character in the book and movie trilogy it is a truly subterranean creature.
However, unlike Smeagol—or Gollum, as the Tolkien character is also called—the spiderlike arachnid never leaves its home deep under the Earth's surface.
It has lost its eyes over the generations it has spent living in total darkness, and has also lost most of the melanin that creatures that live in sunlight need for protection, leaving it pale yellow and sightless.
Daddy longlegs, also known as harvestmen, belong to the order opiliones and while they are arachnids they are not spiders, despite what many people assume.
It is the only species of harvestman that is completely eyeless, researchers say, and its blindness is a classic example of troglomorphism, a physical adaptation that results from constant living in the darkness of caves.
The phenomenon of blindness, along with a loss of melanin or pigment, is seen in numerous cave-dwelling species, such as blind Mexican cavefish or eyeless salamanders found in caves in southern Europe.
Because the creature would be ill-suited for life above the surface in the sun, and cannot therefore travel from one underground habitat to another, the species is possibly in danger of extinction from deforestation around its cave ecosystems, researchers say.
Writing in the journal ZooKeys, the researchers describe finding both adult and juvenile Smeagol in a cave in the Minas Gerais state of Brazil.
The species is the most highly modified of any in the genus and is found only in caves in a particular area of the state, they say.
This isn't the first time scientists have turned to Hollywood or literature to name a new species; earlier this year an armored, suckermouth catfish was named Peckoltia greedoi after the bounty hunter Greedo from the first Star Wars movie.
