Brown lanternshark
species of fish
The brown lanternshark or bristled lanternshark (Etmopterus unicolor) is a little-known species of deep-sea dogfish shark in the family Etmopteridae. It is found off Japan and New Zealand, and possibly also South Africa and Australia, typically deeper than 300 m (980 ft). This species can be distinguished from other lanternsharks by its coloration, which is a uniform dark gray or brown without the ventral surface being much darker and clearly delineated from the rest of the body. The brown lanternshark feeds on small bony fishes, cephalopods, and crustaceans. Reproduction is ovoviviparous, with females giving birth to 9–18 young. An unusually high proportion of individuals in Suruga Bay are hermaphrodites, with both male and female characteristics.
Taxonomy
The brown lanternshark was first described by Robert Engelhardt as Spinax unicolor in 1912, in the scientific journal Zoologischer Anzeiger. The type specimen was a 55-cm-long female from Sagami Bay, Japan. In 1965, Tokiharu Abe redescribed this species and moved it to the genus Etmopterus. The Australian Etmopterus "sp.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brown lanternshark” 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.