Scientists form Taiwan and the US have discovered five new species of tonguefish in the shallow waters of the Indo-Pacific region, the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute said.
Senior technical specialist Lee Mao-ying (李茂熒) and US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher Thomas Munroe made the discoveries together, the institute said in a statement on Thursday.
Their study — published in September last year in the journal Zootaxa — showed that shallow-water tonguefish, in the genus Symphurus, consist of multiple species of flatfish instead of just one as previously thought, it said.
Photo courtesy of the Fisheries Research Institute
Eighty-one tonguefish species have been identified, but it is likely that other unknown flatfish species exist, the institute said.
Lee began researching the subject as a doctoral candidate in 2007, after finding hundreds of small fish in a pile of bycatch at Pingtung County’s Donggang Wharf (東港漁港), it said.
While the fish were initially identified as immature S orientalis, an inspection of their anatomy and a molecular analysis proved the assumption wrong, the statement quoted Lee as saying.
From 2008 to 2016, Lee examined 450 flatfish specimens in museums in Europe, Japan and the US, while additional samples gathered from bycatch in harbors across Taiwan were profiled genetically, he said.
The work resulted in the discovery of S hongae, which Lee first found at the warf, S brachycephalus from Vietnam, S leptosomus from the Philippines, S polylepis from Papua New Guinea and S robustus from Japan, he said.
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