Ana Sofia Reboleira, a biologist from the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark, discovered a new species of a parasitic fungus in a non-traditional way. She discovered the species through Twitter.

She first saw a photo of a millipede posted by Derek Hennen, a doctoral student at Virginia Tech, on Twitter. Hennen regularly posts millipede images of millipedes on his Twitter account.

Reboleira's keen eyes spotted some beguiling dots on the creature's head. She said it looked like fungi on top of the millipede. She explained in a release on Friday that it was the first time the fungi had been found on American millipedes.

On May 15, Hennen shared a Twitter thread recap of how the discovery of the fungi started. He originally posted the photo of the millipede back in 2018. The millipede in the picture came from Ohio, as part of Hennen's promise to send a collection of millipede photos through Twitter to people who have voted in the US midterm elections.

After her initial discovery on Twitter, Reboleira then went hunting for the species in previously undocumented fungus by going through American millipede specimens conserved at the Natural History Museum. Her hunt led to the confirmation of the existence of a previously unknown species of Laboulbeniales.

The species establishes an order that consists of over 2000 species that are obligate biotrophs or ectoparasites of insects, mites, and millipedes. They are possibly the oddest microfungi known because they have no hyphae or the long branching structures found in fungi. Instead, it has cellular thalli formed by the expansion and subsequent cell divisions of the two-celled ascospore.

The researchers have named the species Troglomyces twitteri, after the social media platform where it was discovered. The findings of the study were published in the journal MycoKeys.

Reboleira hopes that more scientists will share their work and discoveries on social media. She says that so far, their discovery of the fungus species has been the first time a scientific discovery has been made on Twitter. She adds that it shows how important social media platforms are in sharing research and achieving new results.

The Role of Social Media on Scientific Studies and Discoveries

Three scientists, who use Twitter on a daily basis to broadcast their science, found a positive equivalence between social media involvement and traditional measures of scholarly activity.

In their study published in 2018 in the journal PeerJ, researchers Clayton Lamb​, Sophie Gilbert, and Adam Ford have concluded that researchers can increase the exposure of their research through social media engagement. Simultaneously, it can also enhance their performance under traditional approaches of scholarly activity.

The researchers explain that there's a big hype when a paper comes out, but they say that there is this dismaying lull for a year or two while waiting for citations to accumulate. They say that most scientists aren't really aware of whether their science was reaching people or not.

In their study, they quantified whether science communication may correlate with more citations. According to Lamb, in the case of Ecology and Conservation Science, it looked like it did.