"The average person already is not aware that Mola mola are off our coast, let alone that we could be misidentifying an animal that big," said Hildering. ![]() Jackie Hildering, co-founder of the Marine Education and Research Society, who is overseeing the collection of sightings of hoodwinkers off the coast of B.C., said the discovery is a testament to how little we know about cold water life and the value of crowd-sourced data in discovering new species. "Sometimes subtleties can be the difference between one species and the next, and that's what's happened here." "It makes you question things you've seen in the past," said Drake. He and his colleagues called it a Mola mola.īut researchers have now identified it as the elusive hoodwinker. One of those photographs came from 2011, when former environmental consultant Matthew Drake investigated a small mola that had been stranded near a seaplane base in Port Hardy, B.C. The hoodwinker is the subject of a collaboration between researchers in Canada, New Zealand and California who are working to expose the sunfish that's been hiding in plain sight, using crowd-sourced data from photographs and sightings along North America's west coast. ![]() They're finding them as far north as Alaska. For years, ocean sunfish, or mola, spotted off Canada's West Coast, were identified as Mola mola, the most abundant and widespread ocean sunfish species found in the Northern Hemisphere.īut now, researchers are identifying a number of these fish as Mola tecta, or hoodwinker sunfish, a species previously thought only to exist in the Southern Hemisphere.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |