A new hammerhead shark species was discovered off the coast of South Carolina.
The new species, Sphyrna gilberti, looks extremely similar to the scalloped hammerhead but is genetically distinct, the researchers who discovered the species say. That’s exactly why it hasn’t been discovered until now, South Carolina ichthyologist Joe Quattro, who led the team involved, says. And it’s rare.
“Outside of South Carolina, we’ve only seen five tissue samples of the cryptic species,” Quattro said in a statement. “And that’s out of three or four hundred specimens.”
Quattro, a student, and colleagues were looking at hammerheads off the coast of South Carolina as part of a study when they saw two different genetic signatures, which led to finding literature by Carter Gilbert, the renowned curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Gilbert had described a scalloped hammerhead in 1967 that had been caught and was in the National Museum of Natural History.
“The team was able to examine it morphologically and suggest that it constituted a cryptic species -- that is, one that is physically nearly indistinguishable from the more common species,” according to a press release.
Quattro noted that shark populations have been decreasing over the past few decades.
“The biomass of scalloped hammerheads off the coast of the eastern U.S. is less than 10 percent of what it was historically,” Quattro said. “Here, we’re showing that the scalloped hammerheads are actually two things. Since the cryptic species is much rarer than the lewini, God only knows what its population levels have dropped to.”
