New-to-science seahorse is one of three long-misidentified species

Scientists have identified a new-to-science seahorse species from the Indian waters, which has helped resolve the taxonomy of a group misidentified for over a century. In 1856, zoologist Johann Jakob Kaup described the thorny or spiny seahorse, Hippocampus histrix, based on samples from Japan. Since then, this seahorse has been thought to be a single, widespread species ranging from the Red Sea, through the Indian Ocean to Japan, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands. Over 150 years later, in 2019, a team of researchers collected two seahorse specimens from trawler bycatch that landed at the Thoothukudi Fisheries Harbour in Tamil Nadu. After studying their morphology and genetic data, and comparing them with samples housed in museum collections around the world, the researchers realised that these two specimens represented a distinct lineage. Their study, published recently in Zootaxa, confirmed what was once thought to be H. histrix is not one, but three separate species—Hippocampus histrix in the Pacific Ocean, Hippocampus jayakari in the Arabian region, and the newly described species from the Indian Ocean named Hippocampus amandavincentae, whose population had long been clubbed with H. histrix. The findings provide a better understanding of spiny seahorse diversity in the Indo-Pacific region. “This discovery shows that identification and understanding species is the first step towards protecting them and their habitat,” said Shalu Kannan, the study’s lead author and a project scientist at the Zoological Survey of India, Andaman and Nicobar Regional Centre. The two specimens that led to the description of Hippocampus amandavincentae were…This article was originally published on Mongabay