NEW SHARK SPECIES DISCOVERED

Analysis by Sarah Simpson 

Meet Bythaelurus giddingsi, a mild-mannered, deep-sea denizen of the Galapagos Islands -- and the world's newest known species of shark.


The animal's chocolate-brown color and asymmetrical distribution of leopard-like spots distinguish it from other closely related species, most of which are spotless brown or gray, explains Douglas Long, a senior curator of natural sciences at the Oakland Museum of California.


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Long recalls the day back in 1995 when he first laid eyes on the mysterious spotted shark, then an unknown species. Long was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Academy of Sciences at the time, and he was in charge of processing the fish and other biological samples that his colleagues had collected during an historic deep-sea survey of the Galapagos that was featured in the Discovery Channel documentary Galapagos: Beyond Darwin.


Pouring out the buckets of fish in his laboratory and studying original sketches from a similar expedition 100 years earlier, Long says he knew immediately that he was examining animals no one had ever seen before. “I remember the next day I came in two hours early just to see what else was there,” Long says. “It was like the most awesome trick-or-treat ever.”


Th spotted shark turned out to be among nearly 30 new species collected during the fateful 1995 expedition and a second trip in 1998. Based on careful examination of seven individual shark specimens in all, Long and his colleagues were able to identify the strangely spotted variety as the newest member of a large family of sharks known as catsharks.


Together with John McCosker of the California Academy of Sciences and Carole Baldwin of the Smithsonian Institution, Long formally named the shark B. giddingsi and presented it to the world this week in the journal Zootaxa.


Also called dogfishes, catsharks are hardly the man-eaters of Jaws fame. Adult B. giddingsi, for example, are about the size of a house cat, just over one foot in length. They typically slink along the seafloor, feasting mainly soft-bodied fish. 


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“The discovery of a new shark species is always interesting, particularly at this time when sharks are facing such incredible human pressure,” says McCosker, who led the two Galapagos expeditions and collected the very first specimen B. giddingsi. McCosker continues:


“Many species have become locally rare and others verge on extinction due to their capture for shark-fin soup. The damage to food webs is dramatic in that their absence removes their ecological services as top-level predators, which are often replaced by other species that further imbalance ecosystems. This deepwater species is probably not susceptible to fishing, however as an insular endemic its population is probably limited in size and would be more susceptible to fishing pressure than more widely distributed species.”


Source: http://news.discovery.com/earth/new-shark-species-120307.html