''Stygarctus keralensis'' is a species of marine
tardigrade
Tardigrades (), known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773, who called them . In 1776, th ...
. It is described from the intertidal area of Vadakara beach,
Kerala
Kerala ( , ) is a States and union territories of India, state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile ...
it can be easily differentiated from closely related species ''S. gourbaultae''. This species was described by groups of researchers namely N.K. Vishnudattan,
S. Bijoy Nandan and P.R. Jayachandran of Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala, India and J.G. Hansen of University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This species has been named after "Kerala State" situated in the south west coast of India where this species live. The present discovery is an outcome of an ongoing Ministry of Earth Sciences-National Centre for Earth Science Studies study on the ecology and diversity of submarine groundwater habitats of Kerala led by
Sivasankaran Bijoy Nandan.
References
External links
Jagran Josh retrieved 22 June 2021
The Hindu.com retrieved 22 June 2021
GK Today retrieved 22 June 2021
{{Taxonbar, from=Q107427135
Stygarctidae