American scientist Stuart Poss has discovered a new species of fish — in a bottle at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity in Grahamstown, IOL reported on Wednesday.
The waspfish, a relative of the venomous stonefish and scorpionfish, was found in 1994 by a company testing new lobster gear off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal.
It took the unusual-looking fish to the Oceanographic Institute in Durban, which sent it to the institute in Grahamstown.
At the institute it was wrongly identified as the same species of waspfish that occurs in Japan and Taiwan — and there it sat for 12 years until Poss came along.
Poss, who works as a scientist at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Mississippi, is an expert on waspfish and their relatives — scorpionfish, lionfish and stonefish, some of the most venomous in the world.
He was at the institute at the invitation of Phil Heemstra to write a chapter on these fish for a book Heemstra is editing on fish of the western Indian Ocean, for research, and to work on a monograph of the world’s scorpionfish.
Heemstra said on Tuesday that when Poss saw the waspfish listed on the computer catalogue as the Japanese species, he was ”immediately suspicious”.
”He knew that species of waspfish was confined to the western Indian Ocean, and this one had been found off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal. He got it off the shelf and out of the bottle and there it was — a new species,” Heemstra said.
Heemstra said Poss will publish a paper on the fish and name it.
”Waspfish are venomous, perhaps not quite as venomous as stonefish, which can be fatal. The spines in stonefish are hollow, like a hypodermic needle, and if you stand on the spines, it shoots poison from the venom gland into your foot. It is extremely painful and can be fatal,” he said. — Sapa