Big-nosed giant guitarfishes and wedgefishes are now the most endangered marine fish group. Will the international community step up to protect them?
Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:
Many scientists wait for their whole careers to see their predictions proven correct — and if that happens, it’s often cause for celebration. But for conservation scientists who study threatened species, it can be a gut punch to learn your prediction’s come true.
For Alec Moore, a conservation biologist at Bangor University, that’s exactly what happened.
In 2016 Moore participated in a symposium focusing on sawfishes, which were then considered the most endangered marine fish in the world. His talk, however, focused on emerging threats to a similar group of fishes called guitarfishes, a type of ray related to sharks.
At the time Moore said several of the 55 known guitarfish species faced a risk of extinction. He then called for “comprehensive and coordinated action” for guitarfish that could be conducted in conjunction with current sawfish conservation efforts — which themselves arrived almost too late.
“While great conservation work is now being done on sawfishes, we have to acknowledge that it had to get to an absolutely critical point before widespread efforts took place to protect them from total extinction,” Moore tells The Revelator. “I wanted to highlight that we would soon be in a similar situation with guitarfishes if we didn’t act now, while there were still some left.”
Last month the IUCN Red List announced that things had indeed taken a turn for the worse, as Moore had feared: Six species of giant guitarfishes and ten species of wedgefishes have now overtaken sawfish as the world’s most endangered marine fishes. Of the 16 species, 15 have been assessed as “critically endangered.”
“The wedgefishes and giant guitarfishes face an extremely high risk,” says Peter Kyne, a senior research fellow at Charles Darwin University. “Their critically endangered assessment means that these species are one step away from extinction.”
In response marine conservation biologists studying the species have dubbed the group “rhino rays” — an allusion to the terrestrial poster child of conservation. The new name also echoes back to the rhino rays’ taxonomic order — Rhinopristiformes — which itself stems from the fact that the rays have big, interesting noses.
Decisions pending this month could determine the fate of these increasingly rare fish.
