Mola tecta
species of fish
The hoodwinker sunfish (Mola tecta) is a large and flat bony fish located in temperate waters. The Latin word "tecta" means hidden, and has been adopted as the name due to the fish blending among other species of sunfish for a prolonged time and only being discovered recently. Belonging to the family Molidae and genus Mola, the hoodwinker sunfish is closely related to the more widely known species: The ocean sunfish (Mola mola). Discovered on a beach near Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2015, it was the first new species of sunfish to be identified in 130 years. Mola tecta are mostly discovered in the temperate region of the Southern Hemisphere in the water near Australia, New Zealand, Southern Chile and Southern Africa. It was first described by Marianne Nyegaard, a marine scientist who studied ocean sunfish for her PhD.
Description
The hoodwinker sunfish is a congener of (in the same genus as) the more widely known ocean sunfish, Mola mola. Mola tecta, like other Mola species, has a flat, almost symmetrical oval shape. It can be distinguished to have a smooth body shape, lack of a head bump, a rounded snout, and a maximum length of 242 cm (about 7.9 feet). It does not have spines in its fins nor real caudal fin (tail fin). Its scales have evolved into small spines.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mola tecta” 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.