New Deep-Sea Mollusk Has an Iron Tongue and Hitchhiking Worms That Eat Its Poo

What’s armored, covered in worms, and has a rasping tongue? If you said the stuff of nightmares, you’re not wrong. Luckily, however, the critter in question is pretty small—and now famous.

Meet Ferreiraella populi, a very weird new species of deep-sea mollusk. It’s a kind of herbivorous mollusc called a chiton and sports an iron-covered radula (the aforementioned rasping tongue), eight armored shell plates, and poop-eating worms close to its tail. It received its first official scientific description on Friday, in a Biodiversity Data Journal study.

Social media-famous critter

A chiton’s “overall body plan is quite good at attaching to things. And for a lot of chitons, that means rocks,” Ze Frank, a science YouTuber, explained in a video. “Those plates give them some protection, but because they’re separate, they’re bendy-bendy. So, they can kind of mold themselves to uneven surfaces while they use their radula to scrape and eat algae.”

Researchers discovered it 18,045 feet (5,500 meters) below the surface of the water in Japan’s Izu-Ogasawara Trench in 2024. It joins a pre-established genus (Ferreiraella) of rare and snobbish mollusks—they live strictly on wood that has drifted down to the deep sea. In fact, their identification bolsters the idea that these environments are home to mysterious, very specialized groups of animals.

Frank participated in the naming of this odd little guy by asking viewers to send ideas for the specific epithet (the second part of the name) to go along with Ferreiraella (the genus), as well as explanations for the suggestion. He and a team of scientists received over 8,000 social media submissions in a single week. In a follow-up video, Frank highlighted a fantastic one that, in my humble opinion, should have been the first-place winner: Ferreiraella ellaellaeheheh. (If I have to explain that reference, go listen to some Rihanna and be ashamed of yourself).

Of the people

The first individual or team to publish a new species’ scientific description gets to choose its name while respecting certain rules. Frequently, specific epithets are inspired by places, people, physical characteristics, or mythology.

Julia Sigwart, a co-author of the study from the Senckenberg Research Institute & Museum, ultimately chose Ferreiraella populi, with “populi” meaning “of the people” in Latin. While that might sound boring for such a funky creature, 11 people separately submitted “populi.” Other contenders included Ferreiraella ohmu, in honor of an animal similar to a chiton in a Studio Ghibli film, and acknowledging the mollusk’s discovery in Japan.

“It can often take ten, if not twenty years, for a new species to be studied, scientifically described, named, and published,” Sigwart said in a Pensoft Publisher statement. In fact, a significant number of species go extinct before ever being discovered. Marine invertebrates particularly face this issue. “Ferreiraella populi has now been described and given a scientific name only two years after its discovery. This is crucial for the conservation of marine diversity, especially in light of the threats it faces such as deep-sea mining!”

The strange new critter sheds light on the strange life that lives in an extreme environment that we’re just beginning to understand.