As commercial fishermen sold their catch at the busy United Fishing Agency (UFA) auction house in Honolulu, Hawaii, fish buyer Garrett Kitazaki noticed something curious about the opah changing hands: some had much bigger eyes, and their spots and color looked different.
As commercial fishermen sold their catch at the busy United Fishing Agency (UFA) auction house in Honolulu, Hawaii, fish buyer Garrett Kitazaki noticed something curious about the opah changing hands: some had much bigger eyes, and their spots and color looked different.
Karen Underkoffler and Megan Luers, then contractors for NOAA Fisheries, followed up by measuring and taking tissue samples from the circular fish that are becoming an increasingly popular dish in restaurants. They sent the samples to John Hyde of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) in La Jolla, Calif., who took the next step of examining their DNA.
Kitazaki was on to something. Opah DNA varied to the extent that the researchers identified three new species of the deep-diving fish, and resurrected one that had been previously described, in addition to the two currently named species for a total of six different species of opah that roam the world’s oceans. Each species is distinguished by different characteristics such as eye size, fin length, and other measurements, Underkoffler, Hyde, and their colleagues reported in a recent articleThe previous link is a link to Non-Federal government web site. Click to review NOAA Fisheries Disclaimer in the journal Zootaxa.
“Once we started looking closely, we noticed more and more differences,” said Underkoffler, lead author of the new paper and now a consumer safety officer in NOAA’s Seafood Inspection Program. “Who knew we were going to dig up so many species when we started? We sure didn’t.”
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