The handfish is unique in that it can appear to “walk” across the seabed in fins that look a bit like small hands.
Video screenshot by Bonnie Burton / CNET
Scientists declared an unusual fish that had bulging eyes and walked on its fins extinct. The smooth handfish is considered the first modern marine fish on record to disappear entirely, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Smooth-handed fish (sympterichthys unipennis) is related to deep sea monkfish. It was one of the first species of fish to be scientifically documented from Australia, in 1802 by the French naturalist François Péron. Mainly inhabiting the waters of south-eastern Australia, hand fishes are bottom dwellers who use their highly modified pectoral fins to walk along the sea floor.
Péron collected the only specimen of the smooth handfish 200 years ago. Because no other examples of smooth handfish have been seen during extensive ocean studies, the fish was declared extinct.
The handfish is unique in that it gives birth to fully formed juveniles directly on the seafloor rather than having a stage in the middle of the water for their larvae. This makes them more vulnerable to fishing or alteration of their breeding habitats. The handfish also have a habit of staying in specific areas, rather than migrating to safer places.
“They spend most of their time sitting at the bottom of the sea, with an occasional fin a few feet if disturbed,” Graham Edgar, a marine ecologist at the University of Tasmania, said in an interview for The Smithsonian in the issue of July. “Because they lack a larval stage, they cannot disperse to new locations and, as a consequence, hand fish stocks are highly localized and vulnerable to threats.”
A well-known scallop fishery that operated in the Tasmania region until 1967 killed many hand fishes because it dredged fish habitat and fishermen dumped the fish that were accidentally caught, said the International Union for Conservation of the Nature.
The extinction of smooth handfish, as well as the current threat to the other 13 surviving handfish species, can be attributed to historical bottom fishing activity, pollution and spawning habitat destruction, the IUCN said in a statement.
Although there is still hope for the remaining species of handfish, the Handfish Conservation Project reported in June that a team of researchers from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania are “breeding red trotters in captivity as part of a conservation strategy to strengthen wild populations. “
In addition to the smooth handfish, The recent IUCN Red List of Threatened Species He also declared Bonin’s pipistrelle bat, splendid poison dart frog, Jalpa’s fake salamander and spiny dwarf mantis as recent extinctions.
