Yesterday we introduced you to four new species of Anniella, or legless lizards, found here in California.

The creatures, previously thought to be categorized under one species known as Anniella pulchra, were described in yesterday’s publication as separate, new species with their own name, range and type locality. Each species was named after a California naturalist that had some association with UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), home of co-author Ted Papenfuss; and the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where co-author James Parham (now at Cal State Fullerton) was a PhD student. The biographies behind these taxonomic namesakes offer a fascinating glimpse into the history and impact of the museums. We thought we’d reveal their stories here today.

Anniella alexanderae is named after Annie Alexander. According to the MVZ website,

She was a naturalist, an intrepid explorer, and an extraordinary patron at a time when women did not have the right to vote and few had any involvement with the world outside their homes.

In 1908, Alexander donated $1 million in an endowment for the creation of the MVZ. The gray-bellied Anniella alexanderae is found in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley, near the town of Taft.

Alexander hired MVZ’s first director, Joseph Grinnell. The recently named purple-bellied species, Anniella grinnelli, is named after him. Even in the 1930s, Grinnell was concerned about conservation. From MVZ’s website:

As a visionary, he could see that the rich and unique vertebrate fauna of California was under siege from increasing impacts of human population growth and unsustainable land use practices.

Anniella grinnelli was discovered in a vacant lot behind the Home Depot in Bakersfield a few years ago. That lot is now developed. In yesterday’s paper, the authors placed the type locality for this species in a reserve that has been set aside to protect the endangered Bakersfield cactus.

Charles Camp was an undergraduate under Joseph Grinnell at the MVZ and later became director of UCMP, which was also created by Annie Alexander. Anniella campi, a yellow-bellied lizard with a double stripe, is named after Camp. In 1915, at the ripe age of 20, the young Camp discovered a new salamander species in California—“a major discovery because its nearest relative was found in Italy!” exclaims Papenfuss.

Anniella campi has the smallest range of all of the new California legless lizard species, occurring in just a few canyons that drain out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and into the Mojave Desert. Papenfuss describes it as a relict: “It dispersed long, long ago when there were moister conditions.”

The yellow-bellied Anniella stebbinsi is named after Robert Stebbins, a herpetologist at MVZ, who was Papenfuss’s advisor. Stebbins, now 98 years old, grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains in southern California. It’s fitting, then, that Anniella stebbinsi’s range is the southern-most of the five California species.

Its type locality is at Los Angeles International Airport—no kidding. “The west side of the main runway at LAX,” Papenfuss confirms. “There are big sand dunes between the runway and the ocean, and the sand dunes are protected due to an endangered butterfly that lives there and nowhere else.” That’s good fortune for Anniella stebbinsi, too. “Everything else around that area is urban sprawl.”

Fascinating reptiles deserve fascinating names and homes!

Anniella grinnelli image: Alex Krohn

The PLoS study does read a bit like a movie. A New World titi monkey fell ill with a cough in May 2009 at the California National Primate Research Center. Its condition worsened and the monkey was put down five days later. ScienceNOW reports that

Four weeks later, another titi monkey came down with the same symptoms. Then another. And another. Within 2 months, 23 of the 65-strong population had become sick, and 19 eventually died.

The center contacted UC colleague and virus researcher Charles Chiu, MD, PhD to help identify the pathogen and prevent its spread to other animals. (We interviewed Chiu, director of the viral diagnostics center at UC San Francisco, two years ago when the swine flu outbreak began.)

Examining tissues from the affected monkeys, Chiu and his team found that the virus clearly belonged to the adenovirus family, yet was unlike any adenovirus ever reported to infect humans or monkeys, including from large-scale studies by public health agencies. The new virus, named titi monkey adenovirus (TMAdV), is so unusual, in fact, that it shares only 56 percent of its DNA to its closest viral relative.

Adenoviruses naturally infect many animals, including humans, monkeys and rodents, and are known to cause a wide range of clinical illnesses in humans, from cold-like symptoms to diarrhea and pneumonia. Unlike influenza or coronaviruses, adenoviruses had not been known to spread from one species to another.

But Chiu noticed something in the lab about the new adenovirus, Nature News writes:

“It was unusual to see it grow well in human cell lines, but not monkey” cells, he says. This suggested that the virus could infect humans as well as titi monkeys. “After we interviewed all of the staff, the only person who said they had been sick was one researcher — the one who had had the closest daily contact with the colony,” says Chiu.

That researcher experienced flu-like upper-respiratory-tract symptoms for four weeks. More crucially, a family member who had never visited the primate center also became ill — demonstrating that TMAdV can spread between humans.

Because the researcher’s illness was minor, it was not reported for several months and the virus could no longer be detected directly. So Chiu worked with the California Department of Public Health to conduct antibody testing on the monkeys, the researcher and the family member. Both the monkeys and two humans tested positive for antibodies to the TMAdV virus. No other humans at the center were infected.

“Now adenoviruses can be added to the list of pathogens that have the ability to cross species,” says Chiu. “It’s been hinted at before, but this study is the first to document these viruses crossing the species barrier in real time.”

Chiu says the lack of previous records of this virus in humans indicates that it is also unlikely to have started with the researcher. In testing other monkeys at the primate center, the team found one healthy rhesus (Old World) monkey with antibodies to TMAdV, which Chiu says could indicate that the virus originated in Old World monkeys, then spread to the New World colony that lacked antibodies against it.

The viral center is conducting further studies in both humans and monkeys in Brazil and Africa to determine whether the virus is common in wild populations of either Old World or New World monkeys, and whether it has crossed species in those settings to humans who live nearby.

It’s very important to note that the humans infected with the virus recovered fully without medical treatment. Contagion this story is not.

In fact, TMAdV may someday be beneficial to humans. From ScienceNOW:

TMAdV’s rarity in humans could make it a potentially powerful tool as a viral vehicle for delivering gene therapy, Chiu adds. Researchers already use custom adenoviruses stitched with beneficial snippets of DNA to treat diseases; for instance, the cancer-fighting virus Gendicine introduces genes that code for the tumor-suppressing protein p53. The problem is that many people have antibodies to these viruses and their immune responses can make such treatments dangerous or even deadly. That problem likely wouldn’t occur with an engineered version of TMAdV because nobody has antibodies to it. Chiu has a patent pending for using TMAdV as a gene-therapy vehicle.

Photograph courtesy of Kathy West