Squalus bassi sp. nov., a new long‐snouted spurdog (Chondrichthyes: Squaliformes: Squalidae) from the Agulhas Bank

Abstract

The long-snouted African spurdog Squalus bassi sp. nov. is described based on material collected from the outer shelf and upper continental slope off South Africa and Mozambique. Squalus bassi shares with S. mitsukurii, S. montalbani, S. chloroculus, S. grahami, S. griffini, S. edmundsi, S. quasimodo and S. lobularis a large snout with prenarial length greater than distance between nostrils and upper labial furrows, dermal denticles tricuspidate and rhomboid and elevated number of vertebrae. Squalus bassi can be distinguished from all its congeners by a combination of body and fin colouration, external morphometrics, vertebral counts and shape of dermal denticles. Similar long-snouted congeners from the Indo-Pacific region, including S. montalbani, S. edmundsi and S. lalannei are compared in detail with the new species. This new species has been misidentified as the Japanese S. mitsukurii and the Mediterranean S. blainvillei due to the lack of comparative morphological analyses. The validity of the nominal species S. mitsukurii in the south-eastern Atlantic Ocean and western Indian Ocean is also clarified herein, indicating it has a more restricted geographical distribution in the North Pacific Ocean.

Squalus shiraii sp. nov. (Squaliformes, Squalidae), a new species of dogfish shark from Japan with regional nominal species revisited

“…Squalus mitsukurii is supported here as a regional endemic species to the North-western Pacific Ocean, which is in disagreement with Schroeder (1948, 1957), Bass et al (1976), Compagno (1984) and Compagno et al (2005a) and which was previously known as cosmopolitan. This result is congruent with recent taxonomic investigations on this species of Viana et al (2017b), Veríssimo et al (2017), Pfleger et al (2018) and Daly-Engel et al (2018) who refuted the occurrence of S. mitsukurii in the Western Indian, Western and Eastern Atlantic Oceans. The present analysis also rejects the occurrence of S. mitsukurii in Hawaiian waters given the validity of S. hawaiiensis, as supported in Daly-Engel et al (2018) and in the diagnosis and remarks above.…”

“…Single or combined taxonomic evidence (e.g. morphological and molecular data) have supported current and constant changes in the taxonomy of S. mitsukurii as seen in Viana et al (2017b), Pfleger et al (2018), Daly-Engel et al (2018) and Dolganov (2019). Thus, reporting occurrences of this species elsewhere, including Nazca and Sala y Gomez seamounts, Chile, India, Mexico (east coast), Costa Rica, Madagascar, Colombia and Uruguay in Parin (1987), Dyer and Westneat (2010), Akhilesh et al (2014), Del Moral-Flores et al (2015, Ehemann et al (2018), Espinoza et al (2018), Fricke et al (2018), Mejía-Falla andNavia (2019) and Nión and Meneses (2016) require taxonomic clarification.…”

“…Systematic approaches of the last decade support that S. mitsukurii comprises a species complex that also includes S. blainvillei, a species originally described from the Mediterranean Sea (Ward et al 2007;Naylor et al 2012;Veríssimo et al 2017). Distribution records of S. mitsukurii from outside the North Pacific Ocean were successively refuted: Duffy and Last (2007b) and Last et al (2007d) for the South Pacific Ocean; Viana et al ( , 2017bViana et al ( , 2018 for the South Atlantic and Western Indian Oceans; and Verissimo et al (2017) for the North-eastern Atlantic and Pfleger et al (2018) for the North-western Atlantic Oceans. Additional species, previously misidentified with S. mitsukurii, were also more recently recognised in the North Pacific Ocean, S. hawaiiensis Daly-Engel, Koch, Anderson, S.…”

DNA Barcoding and Species Delimitation for Dogfish Sharks Belonging to the Squalus Genus (Squaliformes: Squalidae)

“…The haplotype network revealed that S. japonicus, S. edmundsi, and S. grahami did not share haplotypes, unlike S. clarkae and S. mitsukurii, which did. Squalus mitsukurii was originally described in Japan by Jordan and Snyder (1903), and despite identification issues due to morphological character overlapping, this species presents a circumglobal distribution [69], and its occurrence has likely been overestimated [4,70,71].…”

Updated taxonomic list and conservation status of chondrichthyans from the exclusive economic zone of Venezuela, with first generic and specific records

“…Species belonging to the family Squalidae have been under taxonomic revision in recent years, reporting species complexes and describing new species in the area (Bellodi et al, ; Pfleger et al, ; Viana et al, , ; Viana & De Carvalho, ). S. quasimodo has recently been added to the VEEZ, denoting that the species has probably been confused and reported as S. acanthias (L. 1758).…”