The scientist who sniffed out a new species

last updated 8 January 2015

Tony Goldberg’s greatest discovery started with a sharp pain in the nose, said Chris Broughton in The Guardian (U.K.). Goldberg, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had a good idea what was causing the ache, which began just days after he returned from a trip to the Ugandan jungle, where he’d been studying chimpanzees. “Using an angled mirror, I was able to peer up my nose,” he says. “There it was, right where the cartilage meets the bone: the smooth, rounded backside of a fully engorged tick.” Using a pair of lab forceps, the scientist carefully extracted the arachnid. “I needed to avoid killing the creature, in case I caused it to release potentially disease-ridden saliva into my bloodstream.” The bug came out in one piece. “While part of me admired the way the creature had evolved, as if to resist being removed with a fingernail, my initial reaction was that it looked pretty gross.” DNA testing revealed that the tick was a species previously unknown to science that had evolved to hide out in chimps’ nostril cavities. “A biologist can spend a whole career hoping to make such a breakthrough. I feel genuinely grateful to the tick for choosing me as its host.”