The leggiest millipede is only the latest specie to call the
county home
When it comes to being unique, San Benito is like no place else
on earth.
The leggiest millipede is only the latest specie to call the county home
When it comes to being unique, San Benito is like no place else on earth.
Beyond its agricultural roots as once being the hay and apricot capitol of the world, and its renown status as the rein-horse training ground of the universe, the county is gaining a new reputation among earth scientists far and wide: it is home to an array of rare species found in no other place on the globe.
The latest find to be added to the list of unique species is I. plenipes millipede, a creature last seen 80 years ago and thought to be extinct, which has the distinction of being the world’s leggiest animal – up to 750 of the appendages.
The discoverer is not about to disclose the location of the millipede, except to say that it resides in a fragile, moist oak woodland environment. But last week, entomologist Paul Marek of North Carolina made his findings public in the prestigious scientific journal Nature and gave an interview to The Pinnacle.
“I’d love to tell everybody where it is but it’s an incredibly fragile habitat,” Marek said. “It could be easily disturbed.
“It occurs there and no where else on the planet,” he added. “What we determined is that it resides in an area less than a kilometer square in size.”
That’s an area smaller than the patch of hilltop where another species – again, only found in San Benito – was discovered in 1907. Brilliant blue benitoite is considered by many mineralogists to be the world’s rarest gemstone, and is something of a county legacy. The mine sits is in a spot surrounded by a mountain range of serpentine, close to asbestos-dusted Clear Creek and the massive but abandoned KCAC asbestos mine. After a century of mining, the Benitoite Gem Mine is all but pinched out – yet the fluorescent neon blue rock still exists in small but collectible amounts among the cobble piles and tailings of the area – off limits to all but the owner.
San Benito produces this rare stuff – a mesmerizing gemstone, a super-leggy almost extinct millipede, or the tiny rare yellow flower called the San Benito evening primrose – because of a complex mix of conditions that only the county and its environs boasts. Specific reasons may vary among scientists, but it all points to the fact that the county has yet to be paved over by development or disked under by Big Agriculture.
“What makes San Benito so unique is that huge block of serpentine,” said Paul Heiple, a geologist for the California Native Plant Society, Santa Clara Valley chapter. “Almost nothing will grow there, but a few remarkable things do. That’s because of the weird soils there. San Benito is in the inner coastal range, it has unusual rock type, you’ve got high topography. And then you have the San Andreas Fault tearing it all apart.”
“Every place is special, in some way. It’s important to preserve it the way it is because once it’s been taken away, good luck getting it back,” said Paul Johnson, wildlife biologist at the Pinnacles National Monument. “Maybe San Jose once had what we have, but we’ll never know.”
The leggiest find
Paul Marek, a 28-year-old PhD student of arthropods (centipedes, spiders and crustaceans) at Eastern Carolina University says scientists have been searching for the I. plenipes millipede most of his life.
“People have been looking for it pretty intensely for 20 years,” he said. “We had tried a few spots and were rummaging around for it a while.”
In fact, Marek had made several trips to San Benito on his quest for the leggy critter – preceded by many other notable entomologists throughout the years – but it was in the last rainy season that he and his brother Rob hit pay dirt. Their only clues were a vague description of the area written in 1927, when the millipede was last sighted.
“There was a feeling it might be extinct,” Marek said. “I thought it would be an important find.”
And when they found it, it was a “eureka” moment. Marek said he and his brother came across the critter simultaneously, and it was Marek who correctly identified it.
“I got really, really excited, and then my brother did too,” Marek said.
The special millipede the Marek brothers found is now officially categorized as the world’s leggiest animal. Marek took several of the cream-colored specimens back to his university and returned with his doctoral professor, Jason Bond, and collected about a dozen more. The females are leggier, known to have up to 750 legs. The ones they found had between between 662-666 legs, over 170 segments and measured about 33 millimeters (1.3 inches) long. The males were about half of the females’ length with between 318 and 402 legs.
Marek explained that I. plenipes, which is Latin for “the acme of plentiful feet,” comes from an ancient family of millipedes that were around for the big breakup of Pangea 200 million years ago, when the earth’s crust was all one continent.
Marek is now busy working with environmental agency officials, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and other conservation groups, to get the leggy crawler listed on the Endangered Species List – a process that can take up to 10 years.
And he is still not saying where he found them.
“It’s standard procedure not to disclose the location on a restricted species,” he said. “The largest redwood is in a secret location. Who knows what would happen to it if its exact spot were known. There are lots of souvenir hunters out there.”
The pinnacle of diversity
Marek is not the only scientist to make important finds of species that are, so far, endemic to (meaning found only in) San Benito. A few years ago biologist Paul Johnson of the Pinnacles discovered a new aquatic worm in the park’s Chalone Creek. It’s so new it doesn’t even have a name.
Johnson was doing an aquatic inventory when he spotted the odd invertebrate, which resides beneath the bottom gravels of the waterway. It is of the Eremidrilus genus, white, less than an inch long and slightly thicker than a human hair. Johnson sent it to specialists in Washington, and when they realized it was a new species they sent it to yet another specialist at the USGS in Menlo Park, Steve Fend.
Johnson bristles at the thought of naming the new creature after himself.
“They will probably name it after Chalone Creek,” Johnson hoped. “It’s like that millipede. It might be in just this area.”
The Pinnacles could be considered a hotbed of special, endemic species. The Pinnacles buckwheat plant is found only there, as is the Pinnacles shieldback katydid discovered in 1973.
Special mention should be made to the California condor, which through a national recovery effort is making a carefully managed comeback throughout the state. The bird, however, traditionally made its home at the Pinnacles for its rocky spirals and cliff faces, in lofty cubbyhole-caves where the rare bird prefers to nest. The last known wild nesting was sighted in the park in 1898. Some of the last 22 birds caught in the wild in the mid-1980s, needed for a captive breeding program, made the park their home base.
The park is also home to the water loving Pinnacles optioservus riffle beetle, which Johnson says has been found also in Tres Pinos Creek and possibly Arroyo Seco in Monterey County. The way these species get found, he notes, is by human happenstance and curiosity – usually via the visiting naturalist on the lookout for something unusual. The combination of having an accessible park, kept in its natural, pristine state, facilitates these discoveries.
“We are reasonably close to where people live and we are in a place that’s intact ecological condition,” Johnson said. “Of course we all know the grizzly bears and the wolves are gone, but it’s way better than subdivisions. So you tend to find more things.”
The riffle beetle was found by a little girl who picked it up and asked her dad what it was. Since then, outside researchers have come in to study it, and have found that it resides in a two-mile stretch along the creek, in five spots.
“They only like clean water, so it’s a clean water indicator species,” Johnson said.
The Pinnacles has categorized 398 species of bees in the park, a phenomenal mix of species, which park biologists say speaks volumes about the area’s diversity.
“Part of it is location,” said Jim Petersen, head wildlife biologist. “You have the marine influences, north and south. It’s kind of a crossroads of a lot of biotic provinces.”
Animal, vegetable, mineral
Most San Benitoans know about benitoite, the county’s mineralogical claim to fame that became the official California State Gemstone in 1986. But few are aware of the gem’s “associate minerals,” specifically, Joaquinite and Fresnoite, which are also found only in the county and are even more rare than the more famous benitoite.
“They have found microscopic amounts of benitoite in other places of the world, that’s true,” said Heiple. “But none that’s big enough to collect.”
Fresnoite, as its name implies, was discovered just yards across the county borders, but indeed, in Fresno County. But some is found within San Benito borders, very close to the Benitoite Gem Mine. Joaquinite, however, is a San Benito find. It forms typically small, honey-colored sparkling crystals, usually upon green serpentine, and is the product of a quirky hydrothermal phenomenon – the same that created benitoite.
Geologist Heiple says the combination of San Benito’s huge serpentine shelf in the southeast, combined with a colliding of mountain ranges and underground hydrothermal action that occurred millions of years ago, is what produced San Benito’s unique mineral cornucopia. In fact, the San Andreas Fault dissects the four-acre plot of land that comprises the Benitoite Gem Mine.
Heiple, who does work for the CNPS, has toured the southern reaches of San Benito and says the rock and flora of the area fascinates him. His most recent field trip was through the Griswold Hills, near Panoche, where the rare Panoche peppergrass is found.
“There are so many rare and unusual plants there,” he said. “Yes, they go out of the county a bit, maybe on the fringes, but the center of their habitat is San Benito.”
Southeastern San Benito provides a unique ecosystem in itself. Along Panoche-New Idria Road is the only known place where the threatened western mountain Plover winters. One bird was last seen flitting near the Griswold, but as the marshy wetlands of the area dried up in late spring, the plover left. Only an estimated 9,000 western mountain plovers remain in existence – a small number for a bird species.
The big-eared kangaroo rat is another critter, found only on the eastern slope of the coastal range in San Benito.
But why should humans strive to keep a species from going extinct? Jeff Miller, spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity based in San Francisco, says everything has its place. Burrowing owls provide rodent control, butterflies like the endangered bay checkerspot in South Valley help pollinate the region, and the threatened western fence lizard has antibodies, scientists have just discovered, that inoculate ticks against Lyme disease.
“If you lose one you don’t know what kind of ripple effect it will have on everything else,” Miller said.
Biodiversity hotspot
Take away the county borders drawn by humans on a map, and San Benito becomes a center of endemic species.
Much of California – but without the easternmost part of the Sierra Nevada and the southernmost desert habitat – is part of what scientists call the California Floristic Province. The province is one of 34 “biodiversity hotspots” throughout the world, places that hold especially high numbers of endemic species. San Benito, it seems, is the heart of the province, for its extremely variable habitats.
Scientists are saying we are losing are biodiversity hotspots, and subsequently many species of the planet, at an alarming rate. According to Conservational International, an organization that catalogues these hotspots, “While extinction is a natural process, human impacts have elevated the rate of extinction by at least a thousand, possibly several thousand, times the natural rate. Mass extinctions of this magnitude have only occurred five times in the history of our planet; the last brought the end of the dinosaur age.”
But there is hope. This week, the Nature Conservancy announced partnering with the owners of the 11,190-acre Gabilan Ranch, south of San Juan Bautista, to preserve the sprawling and pristine mix of rolling hills, chaparral, oak woodlands, ponds and springs – forever. Many threatened species live on the spread, including the endemic Gabilan Mountains slender salamander.
Entomologist Marek reflects on the bigger meaning of his millipede.
“Yeah, it’s the leggiest creature in the world, but there’s a high probability there are creatures we don’t know about that exist in the California Floristic Province,” Marek said. “It highlights the status that there are areas in California that hold these biodiversity banks, repositories comprised of healthy ecosystems. Humans are part of it, but so are plants and animals. The plants and animals perform ecosystem services – trees produce oxygen and millipedes decompose and provide nutrients for the forest floor. They do all these duties.”
Biologist Johnson explained the importance of preserving the habitats for these creatures, from enormous condors to the tiniest aqua worm.
“We have all this wild, crazy stuff here,” said Johnson. “Everything is connected, it’s all part of a whole. The more you have of the whole, the more it will maintain itself. The more pieces you take out, the more fragile it becomes and it falls apart.”
