New northerly limit for the sharptail mola in the northeast Atlantic: first sighting of Masturus lanceolatus in the northeast Irish Sea
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Abstract
The ocean sunfishes are currently represented by five species within three genera:
Mola mola (Linnaeus, 1758), Mola alexandrini (Ranzani, 1839), Mola tecta (Nyegaard, Sawai, Gemmell, Gillum, Loneragan, Yamanoue & Stewart, 2017) (Sawai et al., 2018), Masturus lanceolatus (Lienard, 1840), and Ranzania laevis (Pennant, 1776). Growing conservation concerns have led to an ongoing re-examination of their classification status on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red Lists, a process requiring the latest data to best support their conservation management on a global scale. Here we report the first sighting of Masturus lanceolatus in the northeast Irish Sea, representing a new northerly range limit for this species in the northeast Atlantic. The species is more commonly reported in tropical seas, and in the Western Atlantic they occur from North Carolina in the United States to southeast Brazil. This sighting increases the most northerly range limit by 2610 km, providing additional insight into the ecology and potentially changing distribution of this generally considered tropical megafaunal species.
KEYWORDS
Molidae, range expansion, stranding, sunfish
First long-term trajectory of an ocean sunfish (Mola mola L.) from the northwestern Mediterranean
Electronic tagging was used to provide the first information on the movements of an ocean sunfish from the northwestern Mediterranean. READ MORE in the Journal of Fish Biology, June 3, 2024
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Evolution, Biology and Conservation
Edited by Tierney M. Thys (California Academy of
Sciences, USA), Graeme C. Hays (Deakin University,
Australia) and Jonathan D. R. Houghton (Queen’s
University, UK).
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