13 new species named Friday: an orchid at risk

The day splits cleanly into two stories. One is the usual pleasure of taxonomic range: seashore beetles on Chinese rocks, edible mushrooms in Yunnan conifer forests, Amazonian earthworms, a mangrove entoproct, a mantis shrimp from Oman, and a name validation for an Australian thrips. The other is sharper: Pleurothallis pembertonii, a cloud-forest orchid from northwestern Ecuador, enters the literature already recommended as Critically Endangered because its known area is only 4 km² and mining concessions overlap its sole known locality. 1

Pleurothallis pembertonii is an epiphytic orchid from Dracula Reserve in Carchi Province, Ecuador, at about 1,970 m in lower montane evergreen cloud forest. Monteros, Holcomb, Baquero, and Wilson describe it as a plant up to 12 cm tall with vinaceous flowers, oblong-subsigmoid petals, and a sagittate-trilobed lip bearing a reniform glenion. The holotype is deposited at Ecuador's National Herbarium (QCNE), and the name honors biologist Robert Pemberton. 1

The authors propose an IUCN category of CR B2ab(iii): the area of occupancy is 4 km², the species is known from one locality, and mining concessions broadly overlap the habitat around that site. The paper also notes a taxonomic problem with conservation consequences: this orchid had circulated in horticulture and online databases under names such as P. forceps-cancri or P. amphigya, which made the microendemic species harder to map and assess. 1

The table keeps the daily records comparable: each row gives the placement, locality, authorship, diagnostic hook, and threat status available from the source paper.

One more Zootaxa correspondence belongs at the edge of the list. Kijevcanin, Gülle, and Yuzuak report new Turkish records of the water-mite family Arrenuridae and describe a new species, but the public page exposes no species name, type locality, or morphological diagnosis. The record is therefore best treated as a likely addition, not as one of the 13 confirmed species above. 11

European Journal of Taxonomy's June 25 volume was a Savignia genus-group revision rather than a new-species paper, so it did not add to the confirmed count above. 12

Cover image: floral variation in Pleurothallis pembertonii from the PhytoKeys species description, showing the lip and glenion characters used to separate the new orchid from close relatives. Image from PhytoKeys under CC BY 4.0.