Extinct in the Wild
Thermosphaeroma thermophilum
Thermosphaeroma thermophilum
Thermosphaeroma thermophilum is a crustacean in the family Sphaeromatidae.
Appearance
Both sexes are gray to reddish-brown in color, with the edges of their bodies being tinted bright orange.
Males tend to reach 7.1 millimeters in length on average (4-13 millimeter range).
Harriet Richardson first described the Socorro isopod in 1897.
Range and habitat
The Socorro isopod lives in warm aquatic habitats. The smaller juveniles and adult females are commonly found residing on vegetation. Meanwhile, adult males are commonly found living directly on the bottom sediments.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
After giving birth, their ovaries will need about 30 days to recover before they can mate again. To determine if mating is worthwhile, male isopods engage in mate-guarding behavior.
There are four main forms of mate guarding behavior: encounter, assessment, rejection, and guarding. Both isopod genders attempt to mate with large-bodied members of the opposite sex.
In crisis
As of 2006, it resides in captive populations at the Socorro Isopod Propagation Facility (SIPF), Albuquerque Biological Park (ABP), the Minnesota Zoo, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Laboratory in Santa Fe, and by the Department of Biology at New Mexico Tech. It was reintroduced following a near-extinction incident in 1988. The wild population became extinct when a tree root burst the pipe and cut off water flow to the concrete pools.
The historical population size of the Socorro isopod is unknown. Their current population size of the wild population is about 2,500 isopods.
Thermosphaeroma thermophilum is Extinct in the Wild on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Thermosphaeroma thermophilum, Wikidata item Q1428605. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
