Researchers Identify New Antarctic Dragonfish That Looks Like Something Out of a Fantasy

A research team hunting zooplankton in Antarctic waters pulled up a tiny larval fish — and accidentally exposed a new species that had been misidentified in museum collections for years.

The discovery of the Banded Dragonfish rewrites part of what scientists know about dragonfish diversity in the Southern Ocean.

An Accidental Catch Is a New Species

Researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) and William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences weren’t looking for fish.

They were trawling for zooplankton off the western Antarctic Peninsula when they netted a larval fish that looked like Akarotaxis nudiceps, a known dragonfish species.

Lead author Andrew Corso ran the DNA. It wasn’t a match.

That single mismatch sent the team back through existing collections, where they found adult specimens of the same new fish species sitting in storage, previously overlooked and misidentified.

Two distinct bands running along the sides of adult Akarotaxis gouldae — absent on Akarotaxis nudiceps — should have been a giveaway.

The finding was published in the journal Zootaxa.

“There are two distinct bands on the sides of adult Akarotaxis gouldae that are not present on Akarotaxis nudiceps, so we were surprised that the species already existed in collections but had been previously overlooked,” Corso said in a news release published by the VIMS in August 2024.

Genetics Alone Didn’t Solve the Mystery

Genetic testing confirmed the Banded Dragonfish as a distinct species. But the visual clues were there all along, in the fish’s banding patterns and in physical differences visible during early life stages.

“In the world of fish taxonomy, it’s becoming common to distinguish species with genetics alone. Genetic testing is an extremely valuable tool, but our discovery highlights the importance of early life stage morphology and natural history collections like those at VIMS and other institutions,” Corso added.

The species is described as slender with a wide snout, an elongate mouth, and its most distinctive physical feature: enlarged, ovoid eyes that bulge from its head. The body is pale brown with slightly darker bands.

Dragonfish generally live in deep water as adults, guard nests in shallower coastal areas and have larvae that stay near the surface.

The New Species Likely Spent 780,000 Years Under Ice

The Banded Dragonfish diverged as a separate species approximately 780,000 years ago, during a period when most of the Southern Ocean was covered in glaciers, according to the researchers.

Corso and his team have a hypothesis for how it happened.

“We hypothesize that a population of dragonfishes may have become isolated within deep trenches under glaciers, surviving on food pushed in by the moving ice. Once the glaciers retreated, this subpopulation had become distinct enough to be reproductively incompatible with Akarotaxis nudiceps,” Corso said, per VIMS.

That isolation, playing out over hundreds of thousands of years beneath Antarctic glaciers, produced a fish that now appears to have one of the smallest geographic ranges of any Southern Ocean fish, according to the study.

Its known habitat is confined to the western Antarctic Peninsula.

A Tiny Range and a Trawling Problem

A small geographic range is a vulnerability — and the Banded Dragonfish has several compounding risk factors the researchers flagged.

Those risk factors include low reproduction rates (examination of ovaries suggests low reproductive capacity) and the fact that its early life stages occur in shallow waters.

That last point is where the concern gets specific. The region where the Banded Dragonfish lives is heavily targeted by the Antarctic krill fishery. Commercial vessels trawl in depths of 0–250 meters, the same shallow zone where larvae may be present.

A species that survived 780,000 years under glacial ice now faces a different kind of pressure: industrial fishing nets dragging through waters where its youngest members drift.

Researchers say more caution is needed until the ecosystem is better understood.

Named After a Supply Vessel, Not a Scientist

The species was named Akarotaxis gouldae in honor of the Antarctic research and supply vessel (ARSV) Laurence M. Gould and its crew.

The ship supported U.S. Antarctic research for 27 years, from 1997 until August 2024, when it was decommissioned.

During that stretch, the vessel spent nearly 6,300 days at sea, much of it in the Drake Passage.

Scientists named the species to honor the vessel and crew and to highlight the importance of continued Antarctic research.

What This Fish Reveals About What We Don’t Know

The Banded Dragonfish is a case study in how much remains unknown even in waters scientists have been sampling for decades.

A species can sit in a museum jar, mislabeled, for years. It can swim through research nets and get catalogued as something else entirely.

It took a DNA mismatch from a single larval fish — caught by accident — to unravel the whole thing.

Genetic tools are powerful but not sufficient on their own; Corso’s team needed physical observation and natural history collections to complete the picture.

Species with extremely small ranges and low reproductive capacity are especially exposed to commercial activity, even in the remote Antarctic.

And as research vessels like the Laurence M. Gould are retired, the infrastructure that makes discoveries like this possible gets harder to replace.

Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.