A colorful and previously unknown species of tropical fish has been discovered off Mexico’s Pacific coast by a team of scientists that included UC San Diego researcher Ben Frable.
The discovery was made in the Revillagigedo Archipelago, a group of four volcanic islands famous for its diverse marine life.
Frable and his colleagues collected eight specimen of the species, which has been given the scientific name Halichoeres sanchezi. It also will be known as a tailspot wrasse. The discovery was reported Wednesday in the scientific journal PeerJ.
The specimens, which included males and females, ranged from roughly 1 inch to 6 inches in length.
“The smaller females of the species are mostly white with reddish horizontal stripes along their top half and black patches on their dorsal fin, behind their gills, and just ahead of their tail fin,” UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography said in a statement.
“Frable described the males as ‘orangy red up top fading to a yellow belly with a dark band at the base of the tail.’ “
The discovery occurred off San Benedicto, one of the islands in the chain. The region is so remote and has such sound environmental protections, Frable said in a statement, that it has created a “window back in time to before intensive fishing — there are many sharks and big groupers that would be fished out in other places.”
