A new species of fish has been discovered in the northeast Atlantic, something special for scientists since it is an area specially studied and exploited by fishing fleets.
Researchers from the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History in Germany and Wageningen Marine Research (WMR) in the Netherlands discovered the new species — which they have named Microichthys grandis, literally “big little fish” — during a survey off the Irish coast on last year. It is two inches long, but larger than all of its relatives, and is featured in the journal Ichthyological Research.”Discovering a new species of fish in the northeast Atlantic is a rare event. It has never happened before in the history of our institute. , founded in the 1950s. This fish was caught in an area where there is a lot of fishing, especially by Dutch fishermen. So one would expect the species to have been caught before. If this is the case, it at least escaped the care, until last year,” WMR researcher Bram Couperus said in a statement.
The new species of fish was detected last year during the blue whiting survey, a survey conducted annually to assess blue whiting populations in European waters. Says Couperus: “Blue whiting lives in the so-called mesopelagic or twilight zone. At that depth you will find surprising species, such as lanternfish and deep-sea anglerfish. Among them, suddenly there was an unknown fish.”
For the Wageningen researchers, the search for the fish’s identity led a Russian taxonomist to the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History in Germany, where fish taxonomist Ronald Fricke already had experience with this group of fish, the deep-sea cardinals. (Epigonidae).
Fricke notes: “Deep-sea cardinals of the genus Microichthys are known from three other species that live in the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic. They are free-swimming in deep water and only a handful of specimens are known to science.
Fricke further suggests a theory about the zoogeography of the species: “There are currently two pairs of species, one in the Atlantic and the other in the Mediterranean. During the Mediterranean salinity crisis about 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean was dry and it could not be inhabited by fish, so a couple of species survived in the Atlantic.When the Strait of Gibraltar opened again, they migrated to the Mediterranean, but because the deep waters of the Mediterranean are much warmer, they adapted to these conditions and evolved into separate species.”
One of the reasons the fish had not been detected before is that it is only 5.5cm in size, making it easy to slip through the meshes of a net or go unnoticed when caught. Previously known species of this group of fish are even smaller than the specimen caught. The Latin name for this genus is therefore Microichthys, which means “little fish”. The new species receives the addition “grandis”. That makes its full name Microichthys grandis, literally “big little fish.”
The location where the fish was caught is Porcupine Bank Canyon, an underwater canyon with cold-water corals along the western edge of Porcupine Bank. The fishing technique used by the researchers did not involve bottom trawling. This is because blue whiting is a pelagic species that swims in schools in the water column and is not attached to the seabed. Fishing vessels targeting blue whiting in the area also fish with pelagic nets. The researchers suspect that the newly discovered species is naturally very rare and also so small that it usually passes through the meshes of the net, making the chances of catching it very low.
