Showing posts with label Wedgefishes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wedgefishes. Show all posts

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Mystery Wedgefish?


The CITES CoP18 will be held in Colombo in May. 
Among the species proposed for listing are the Wedgefishes and Giant Guitarfishes that are both being persecuted mercilessly for their fins, and ever more threatened with extinction as a consequence.
 
Above is a Wedgefish from Fiji - click for detail.
The pics are from the FB page of the Waidroka Bay Resort, i.e. from just around the corner. Our local Wedgefishes are a bit of a mystery and consistently being misidentified, mostly as Rhynchobatus djiddensis which this one is clearly not - so which one is it?

Brand-new ID guide right here.
Thoughts?

PS: indeed R. australiae or laevis - or yet another undescribed Wedgefish from that species complex. That said, Kerstin has already identified australiae by DNA barcoding back in 2015!
And, remember?
 

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Sawfishes in Fiji? Alas not!

Wanted: ID pics from Fiji!
Guitarfish, Rhynchobatus laevis, (not dijiddensis as in the original caption) possibly the species seen here in Fiji - but maybe not! :)

Nice paper!
Sawfishes are among the most threatened Elasmobranchs and all seven species are listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. They generally inhabit shallow coastal waters of continental shelves and estuarine habitats and are not generally known from oceanic islands.

It was thus quite a coup when one turned up on a Fiji fish list.
Clinton Duffy, yes as in Grim the tourist, has followed up on the Fiji record and after meticulous research all the way to linguistics, he comes to the conclusion that the origin of the specimens is suspect and that there are no credible recent records of Sawfishes having been sighted or caught in the archipelago.
You can read a preview here and get the whole paper here.

Clinton is now looking at Shovelnose Rays, Genus Rhynchobatus.
They are rather frequently sighted in Fiji but nobody seems to have identified the exact species. Does any of our readers have any good ID pictures he would be willing to share with Clinton?
Any help would be much appreciated!

Vinaka!