KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 February 26, 2019 \u2013 溏心vlog免费B站 shark researcher Bradley Wetherbee is best known for his studies of mako sharks, the fastest swimming sharks in the world. But when it came to identifying and describing a new species of shark, the process was anything but fast.<\/p>\n
It took Wetherbee and his colleagues nearly 30 years to reveal that a group of lantern sharks inadvertently captured in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands were a new species.<\/p>\n
Wetherbee named the shark Laila\u2019s lantern shark (Etmopterus lailae<\/em>) after his 17-year-old daughter, Laila Mostello-Wetherbee. They live in Lincoln<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not uncommon for it to take many years for a new species to be recognized as new to science and then properly described and named,\u201d said Wetherbee, a professor in the 溏心vlog免费B站 Department of Biological Sciences. \u201cThis one just took a little longer than usual.\u201d<\/p>\n Laila\u2019s lantern shark grows up to three feet long, has a dark brown back with a black T-shaped flank marking, spines coming from its dorsal fin, and a longer snout than other lantern sharks. Like most lantern sharks, they are bioluminescent. The new species is found in waters approximately 1,000 feet deep.<\/p>\n Why it took Wetherbee so long to identify it as a new species is a long story.<\/p>\n While studying deep-sea sharks as part of his doctoral research at the University of Hawaii in the early 1990s, he was offered two large boxes of frozen sharks \u2013 about 150 individuals \u2013 that had been captured in 1988 by scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service. The scientists were studying armorhead fish and were uninterested in the sharks.<\/p>\n 溏心vlog免费B站 a year later, Wetherbee examined the specimens and sorted them according to what species he believed they were \u2013 smooth lantern sharks and rough lantern sharks. Little was known about either species, so he planned to give the specimens to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu for inclusion in its natural history collection. But before he could do so, the freezer where they were being stored broke down while Wetherbee was away on a research cruise. One box of sharks was salvaged, including specimens that would later be named Laila\u2019s lantern shark, but the rest had thawed so much that they had to be thrown out. Just 15 survived intact.<\/p>\n \u201cI had gone through every individual in the boxes and measured many body parts so we had enough information to write a paper about their biology, because hardly anything was known about them,\u201d explained Wetherbee. \u201cBut then I ran into someone that was working on the classification of lantern shark species in the genus Etmopterus<\/em>. He wanted to look at the specimens before we wrote our paper, so we had the sharks shipped to his lab in California.\u201d<\/p>\n It took that man, David Ebert at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, about five years, but he eventually examined the specimens in great detail and compared them with other species of lantern shark and determined that Wetherbee\u2019s sharks did not belong to any of the other already-described smooth nor rough lantern shark species but was a species new to science.<\/p>\n \u201cSince the sharks were essentially mine to begin with, Dave and the others involved agreed to let me name it after my daughter,\u201d Wetherbee said.<\/p>\n It then took several more years for them to write the definitive paper describing the new species, which was finally published in the journal Zootaxa<\/em> in 2017.<\/p>\n According to Wetherbee, the only specimens of the new species ever seen are those individuals he and his colleagues had studied.<\/p>\n \u201cIt likely has a very small distribution only around the seamounts northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. That\u2019s the nature of lantern sharks. There are different species in different areas, and they tend to be isolated,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you went to that spot and fished for them, you\u2019d probably catch them. But it\u2019s so remote, there\u2019s not much of a reason for anyone to go there.\u201d<\/p>\n Wetherbee\u2019s daughter wasn\u2019t especially impressed at first that her father named a shark after her, but she has grown to appreciate it.<\/p>\n \u201cAt first it didn\u2019t really register with me as anything special, but then when my friends Googled me and saw that I had this shark named after me, they thought it was cool,\u201d said Mostello-Wetherbee, a senior at Lincoln High School. \u201cNow I appreciate it a lot more, not because of my friends\u2019 reaction, but because as I\u2019ve gotten older, I understand it more and think it\u2019s really neat.\u201d<\/p>\n The 溏心vlog免费B站 shark expert said that naming the shark after his daughter may have rekindled his interest in the animal nearly 30 years after he first laid eyes on it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are only 500 species of sharks and only a handful of people in the world have a shark named after them,\u201d Wetherbee said. \u201cNow that it\u2019s called Laila\u2019s lantern shark, it certainly gives me motivation to go back to Hawaii to study it.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople often ask me what my favorite shark is, and I used to say the tiger shark,\u201d he concluded. \u201cBut now I say it\u2019s Laila\u2019s lantern shark.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 February 26, 2019 \u2013 溏心vlog免费B站 shark researcher Bradley Wetherbee is best known for his studies of mako sharks, the fastest swimming sharks in the world. But when it came to identifying and describing a new species of shark, the process was anything but fast. 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