The newly discovered tailspot wrasse was found off the Mexican Galapagos in late 2022 but the new species was only named recently in a scientific journal.
A vermillion-colored male tailspot wrasse is shown here. If the wrasse get big and live long enough, they become males. A tiny, orange-vermillion colored fish has been named a new species after a team of divers from Southern California and Mexico found the wrasse in deep water among volcanoes and rugged rocks near the remote Mexican Revillagigedos Islands in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
Declaring a new species isn’t an easy process. It required at least six months of DNA research, and then it took another six months for Victor to write up the discovery in the journal. The announcement of a new species isn’t publicly revealed until it’s published in a science journal. “This species is unusual among wrasse, where the male is almost always the more colorful one,” Victor said. “In this species, the female is more colorful.”
The expedition to the islands took two days on a boat from Cabo San Lucas. It was organized by professor and marine scientist Carlos Armando Sánchez Ortíz of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur. The wrasse’s official name, Halichoeres sanchezi, includes a nod to Sánchez. “When he brought it up to the ship in a bag, we all said, ‘That’s it!” Victor said. “It was a different-looking wrasse, and it was a baby.”“Juveniles often look the same to related species,” he said. “The males become different because they do the mating displays, which are the first thing to change when a new species splits from an ancestral species. Males are needed to discover the difference about what’s unique for that species and that makes it a new species in science.
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