Reef Builders Alumni and master ichthyologist, Yi Kai, has teamed up with a star studded team and as Kai put it “combined five years worth of ROV and BRUV video footage with specimen based exploration and museum vouchers in an effort to characterise the deep-reef ichthyofauna of the Coral Sea Marine Park”. In layman’s terms, they’ve analyzed work from multiple different institutions/groups to identify 62 new records of fishes. Of the 62, 45 are new for Australia, 4 are new records for the Southern Hemisphere, and 21 species are potentially completely new to science!
Surprisingly, the fish biodiversity of the Coral Sea remains largely unknown. This area includes Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Tasman Sea. Due to its massive size and varying architecture and immense depths, it’s difficult to explore. ROVs and BRUVs have helped make great strides in deep exploration and the Schmidt Ocean Institute and James Cook University have played an integral role in this department.
Check out some of the amazing fish in the paper. Full link to the paper below.
Read the whole paper here (it’s free and open access). It’s loaded with more amazing photographs and info.
