* Nine new species for disappearing handfish family
* Invasive screwshell - making new habitat?

Nine new species for disappearing handfish family

Pink Handfish. Photo: Karen Gowlett-Holmes

Nine new species of handfish have been described by CSIRO in research that highlights an urgent need to better understand and protect the diversity of life in Australia’s oceans.

The new species are described in a review of the handfish family by Hobart-based fish taxonomists from the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship and Marine Biodiversity hub researchers, Daniel Gledhill and Peter Last.

Supported by funding from the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, the review of the handfishes brings the family to 14 known species – six found only in Tasmania and one known from only one specimen possibly collected in Tasmania by early European explorers, yet not recorded since. It also deepens concerns about declining populations of some handfishes.

“Handfishes are small, often strikingly patterned or colourful, sedentary fish that tend to ‘walk’ on the seabed on hand-like fins, rather than swim. Fifty million-years ago, they ‘walked’ the world’s oceans, but now they exist only off eastern and southern Australia,“ Mr Gledhill says.

One of the newly named species, the Pink Handfish, is known from only four specimens and was last recorded off the Tasman Peninsula in 1999. The Pink Handfish will feature in a photographic exhibition of Australia’s marine biodiversity that opens today (21 May) at Questacon in Canberra.

The exhibiton is mounted by the Marine Biodiversity Hub, a national research partnership charged with furthering knowledge of Australia’s oceans, and coincides with the United Nations’ International Year of Biodiversity (2010) and International Biodiversity Day, 22 May 2010.

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Image: Pink Handfish. Photo Karen Gowlett-Holmes

Invasive screwshell - making new habitat?

NZ screwshell: Photo: Neville Barrett, TAFI

Australian marine scientists have discovered that the impact of an introduced species of shellfish – the New Zealand invasive screwshell - has grown dramatically.

The New Zealand screwshell (Maoricolpus roseus) entered the Tasmanian marine environment some 70 years ago – and now covers large areas of the marine environment, from D’Entrecasteux Channel to Sydney Harbour.

Marine Biodiversity Research Hub Director, Professor Nic Bax, said the various impacts of the screwshell were a clear demonstration of how human intervention can alter the marine environment irrevocably. “There is only finite space in the marine environment; in this instance what was there originally has gone,” Prof. Bax said.

Using an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) from IMOS (International Marine Observing System), the Hub has extensively mapped the seabed in eastern Tasmanian waters. “We now have a much better understanding of the deeper shelf habitats,” Dr Neville Barrett said. “We knew that this screw shell species had formed extensive cover in parts of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, but were not aware of similar densities in other areas of the east coast. “The invasive screwshell has displaced indigenous shellfish and surrounding ecosystems.”

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Image: NZ screwshell. Photo: Neville Barrett, TAFI