“Like really, really obsessed,” said the biodiversity postdoctoral fellow, who works in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. By college, she had turned her attention to seabound invertebrates such as sea sponges, urchins, shrimp, and squat lobster, Rodríguez-Flores’ specialty. In a new study published in Invertebrate Systematics, she and a team of researchers identified five new species of deep-sea squat lobsters in the Munidopsidae family. All of which adds urgency to scientists’ desire to discover and study these animals before it’s too late. The squat lobsters Rodríguez-Flores and her team identified live about 2,000 to 5,000 kilometers, or about 3 miles, below the ocean’s surface.
