Marine biologists have described two new species of coral reef fish from the waters off Curaçao, southern Caribbean.
The Spot-tail golden bass (Liopropoma santi). Image credit: Baldwin CC / Robertson RD.
To collect deep-reef fish, the scientists are diving to 300 m off Curaçao using a manned submersible.
“This underexplored zone between 60 and 300 m in the tropical southern Caribbean is revealing extraordinary biodiversity, including a wealth of new species of beautifully colored fishes. It’s a zone that science has largely missed because it’s too deep to access using scuba gear, and deep-diving submersibles rarely stop at such shallow depths,” said Dr Carole Baldwin of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who is the lead author of two papers published in the journals ZooKeys and PLoS ONE.
Scientists originally thought there was a single species of golden bass on deep reefs off Curaçao, but DNA data, distinct color patterns, and morphology revealed three.
The two new species belong to the genus Liopropoma and resemble a previously known golden bass found at Curaçao, Liopropoma aberrans.
The Yellow-spotted golden bass (Liopropoma olneyi). Image credit: Barry Brown.
One of the new species has been named Liopropoma santi after Mr Roger Sant, who participated in a submersible dive during which a specimen of this species was collected.
This fish is the deepest known species of Liopropoma in the Atlantic Ocean. Its common name is the Spot-tail golden bass. It has yellow body and fins, a dark spot on the lower part of the tail fin.
The second species has been named Liopropoma olneyi after Dr John E. Olney. The common name is the Yellow-spotted golden bass.
This species differs from all other western Atlantic Liopropoma in having a unique color pattern – most notably the predominance of yellow pigment on the dorsal portion of the trunk, a pale to white body ventrally, and yellow spots scattered across both the dorsal and ventral portions of the trunk.
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Baldwin CC, Robertson RD. 2014. A new Liopropoma sea bass (Serranidae, Epinephelinae, Liopropomini) from deep reefs off Curaçao, southern Caribbean, with comments on depth distributions of western Atlantic liopropomins. ZooKeys 409: 71–92; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.409.7249
Baldwin CC, Johnson GD. 2014. Connectivity across the Caribbean Sea: DNA Barcoding and Morphology Unite an Enigmatic Fish Larva from the Florida Straits with a New Species of Sea Bass from Deep Reefs off Curaçao. PLoS ONE 9(5): e97661; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097661
