Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-29-2020
Publication Title
Frontiers in Marine Science
Keywords
Leptocephali, Leptocephalus, MOCNESS, DEEPEND, ONSAP, Gulf of Mexico
ISSN
2296-7745
Volume
7
Issue/No.
169
First Page
1
Last Page
13
Abstract
Leptocephalus larvae of elopomorph fishes are a cryptic component of fish diversity in nearshore and oceanic habitats. However, identifying those leptocephali can be important in illuminating species richness in a region. Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, sampling of offshore fishes in the epi-, meso-, and upper bathypelagic depth strata of the northern Gulf of Mexico resulted in 8989 identifiable specimens of leptocephalus larvae or transforming juveniles, in 118 taxa representing 83 recognized and established species and an additional 35 distinctive leptocephalus morphotypes not yet linked to a known described species. Leptocephali account for ∼13% of the total species richness of fishes collected in the offshore region. A new morphotype of Muraenidae leptocephalus is also described. We compare this study with other leptocephalus diversity studies in the western Atlantic.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
NSUWorks Citation
Jon A. Moore, Dante Fenolio, April Coan, and Tracey Sutton. 2020. Hiding in Plain Sight: Elopomorph Larvae Are Important Contributors to Fish Biodiversity in a Low-Latitude Oceanic Ecosystem .Frontiers in Marine Science , (169) : 1 -13. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/occ_facarticles/1091.
ORCID ID
0000-0002-5280-7071
DOI
10.3389/fmars.2020.00169
Comments
©2020 Moore, Fenolio, Cook and Sutton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.