NEW MOLA SPECIES

For the first time in 130 years, a new species of Mola has been described. Lead author Marianne Nyegaard of the Murdoch University in Australia and her colleagues have named the new species the “hoodwinker” sunfish or Mola tecta, derived from the Latin word tectus meaning disguised or hidden.

As part of her PhD research, Nyegaard analysed DNA from more than 150 skin samples of sunfish and found that the samples pointed towards four distinct species. But only three species had been previously described, the scientists report in a new study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. The fourth one had not been recorded yet. A Japanese research team had found similar genetic evidence of an unknown sunfish species in Australian waters some 10 years ago.

To find out what this new species might look like, Nyegaard started scouring social media for pictures of sunfish and built a network of people across Australia and New Zealand who could alert her whenever a sunfish was observed. She hit the jackpot in 2014 when four sunfish were stranded on the same beach in New Zealand.

Scientists have yet to categorically determine the range of this new species, but they have found individuals around New Zealand, Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales Australia, South Africa and southern Chile.

The ocean sunfish is one of the strangest and most elusive of the oceans’ inhabitants.

They spend most of their lives feeding hundreds of metres deep, surfacing rarely to bask in the sunlight and visit cleaning stations.