SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Our next story is a scientific tale of lost and found. Back in the 1950s, a researcher in Japan discovered a tiny translucent orange worm, living in corals off the country's Pacific coast. He wrote a paper about it and named it Haplosyllis anthogorgicola. For the next seven decades, the worm lived in obscurity, confined to a few scattered mentions in scientific journals, that is, until Chloe Fourreau came along. She's studying for her PhD in Japan, and her thesis is on marine worms, so she set up a dive to go hunting for it in southern Japan.
CHLOE FOURREAU: We have to climb rocks for 15 minutes before we can reach the water with our tanks, and then we can only go there at a certain time in between the tides when the sea's calm, so it can be very difficult.
DETROW: She dove more than 60 feet, found the right coral species and then cut off a piece.
FOURREAU: I actually screamed underwater because just after collecting my coral, I looked at my tube, and I saw all these tiny little orange-looking worms. I immediately knew that they were there.
DETROW: And after the dive, the tail of the worm got more interesting because Fourreau noted that a tiny, colorful sea horse lives on the same corals. It's adorable, so scuba divers have uploaded hundreds of pictures of it to the community science site iNaturalist.
FOURREAU: So this kind of set me on a track to follow the seahorse to find the worms.
DETROW: Once she started looking through divers' seahorse photos, she saw the worm hanging out all over the Pacific, photobombing, if you will.
FOURREAU: Not only in Japan, but also Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, and so on - so it's quite exciting.
DETROW: She published a map in a Royal Society journal this week and says, it's a reminder that some of Earth's most overlooked creatures might be hiding in photos of other more charismatic animals, just waiting to be rediscovered.
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