…AND A FISHY FIND IN AUSTRALIA
Taking notice of local testimony also assisted
in the startling scientific discovery of a quite sizeable new species of marine fish in Australia recently that had actually been hiding in plain sight. In November 2019, Queensland Museum ichthyologist Dr Jeffrey W Johnson announced that a local fisherman had sent him a photograph of a type of grouper he had never seen before. He asked the fisherman to send him the fish itself, only to learn that it had already been sent to a fish market. Further enquiries revealed that this scientifically mysterious grouper was a tasty fish that was commonly caught, sold, and eaten by locals in southeastern Australia, who referred to it as the rockrod. This surprising discovery led Johnson to a fish market in Brisbane’s North Lakes area, where he was able to procure five specimens of rockrod, which were then passed on to Queensland Museum geneticist Dr Jessica Worthington Wilmer. She ran a series of molecular and genetic tests on samples taken from them, and also compared them morphologically with grouper specimens of other species in a number of museums around the world. The results of these analyses confirmed that this form of grouper did indeed constitute a valid new species, now formally dubbed Epinephelus fuscomarginatus by Johnson and Wilmer ina Zootaxa paper. Just over 2ft (60cm) long and predominantly pink, but with dark-brown edges to its caudal, anal, and soft dorsal fins, the rockrod can be found at depths of around 720ft (220m) off the central section of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef. Interestingly, Johnson had been alerted by various locals to this fish’s existence prior to receiving the fisherman’s photograph, but had not previously been able to locate specimens for examination.
www.independent.co.uk/ news/science/australia-newfish-species-grouper-eatingfishing-queensland-a9184371. html 4 Nov 2019; https:// biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/ article/view/ zootaxa.4674.3.2