Scientists accidentally discover new species of shark
Sphyrna lewini or Sphyrna gilberti? It's not so easy to tell with these cryptic species!
A team of scientists working along the coastal waterways of South Carolina have made an amazing discovery — a previously unidentified species of hammerhead shark that was essentially 'hiding' in plain sight.
It's understandable that this new species, now called the Carolina hammerhead or Sphyrna gilberti, went unnoticed until now. They're what's known as a 'cryptic species', since they're virtually indistinguishable from the more common scalloped hammerhead shark. You can't tell them apart from each other just by sight alone.
If you wanted to get close enough (scalloped hammerheads have attacked people in the past), you could count the number of vertebrae they have their spine, and you'll find that the Carolina hammerhead has 10 fewer than the scalloped hammerhead. However, ichthyologist Joe Quattro and his team only found out about the differences in vertebrae after the fact. The first indications of a new species they found was after collecting DNA samples from various hammerheads that were raising pups along the South Carolina coastline. According to the UofSC news release, some of the samples showed a different 'genetic signature' from the others, revealing that they were looking at two different species, even though they physically looked alike.
The new species, S. gilberti, has been named after Carter Gilbert, a curator emeritus of the Florida Museum of Natural History, who worked there from 1961 to 1998 and first documented a specimen from this species back in 1967.
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Since their discovery, Quattro and his team have gathered more information on this rare species, measuring over 50 individuals, and have submitted their results to the zoological taxonomy mega-journal Zootaxa.
Although this discovery is an amazing accomplishment, there is a note of worry amid the excitement. According to Quattro, out of three or four hundred specimens examined, they've only seen five samples from this new species outside of South Carolina, so it is already very rare. With hammerhead populations along the east coast of the United States dropping to less than 10 per cent of what they once were, they're unsure of exactly how few of this new species are still around.
(Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)