Black ghostshark
species of chordates
The black ghostshark (Hydrolagus homonycteris), also known as the black chimaera, is a chimaera species within the family Chimaeridae. The species lives off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, in depths of 500–1,450 m (1,640–4,760 ft). It has a black or dark brown body; males have a total length of 108 cm (43 in). The species is closely related to the abyssal ghostshark. Although it is sometimes caught as a bycatch, it does not have any major threats and is listed as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Taxonomy and etymology
The black ghostshark was described by Dominique A. Didier in 2008. It is one of 23 species in the genus Hydrolagus. Its genus name, Hydrolagus, comes from the Greek words hydro, which means "water" and lagos, which means "hare". The specific name, homonycteris, is composed of the word homo, the Latin word for man, and nycteris, the word for bat. Its name was taken after Thomas A. Griffiths, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, whose students called him "bat man".
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This entry incorporates text from “Black ghostshark” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.