Diario del proyecto Australasian fishes

Archivos de diario de abril 2019

09 de abril de 2019

Australasian Fishes findings: Feb - March 2019

Australasian Fishes now contains over 49,000 observations (>2100 species) uploaded by more than 1500 people. The table below shows some interesting observations uploaded during February and March 2019. For more details contact Mark McGrouther.

Total observation summary:
Subject Number of observations
Range extension / first record 117
Diet / feeding 27
Parasite / fungus 22
New species / newly described     11
Colour pattern 26
Damage / injuries 18
Courtship / reproduction 28
Behavioural information 15
Publicado el abril 9, 2019 04:56 MAÑANA por markmcg markmcg | 2 comentarios | Deja un comentario

11 de abril de 2019

Ralph Foster faces the media about Sunfish

On 16 March 2019 Jacob Jones and Craig Tarry photographed a sunfish washed up on the beach near the mouth of the Murray River, South Australia.
Word got out about the fish and Ralph Foster the local expert who works at the South Australian Museum was swamped with calls. View article on the ABC News site.
The fish was identified as an Ocean Sunfish, Mola mola. Ralph stated ""I've had a good look at it, we get three species here and this is actually the rarest one in South Australian waters," The other two are the Bump-head Sunfish, Mola alexandrini and the Hoodwinker Sunfish, Mola tecta. Ralph estimated that the fish was about 1.8 metres long. He stated, "this particular sunfish was on the smaller end of the scale in terms of size".
In her comment on the page, world Sunfish expert Marianne Nyegaard stated, "This is definitely Mola mola. Eye-balling it my guess is that it would cluster with the Pacific clade genetically, however there is at present no documented, official way of morphologically distinguishing the two genetic clades of Mola mola (Atlantic/Indian Ocean and Pacific)."
Thank you all for your contributions to this important observation.
Publicado el abril 11, 2019 06:03 MAÑANA por markmcg markmcg | 4 comentarios | Deja un comentario