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.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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