Pancake batfishes may be getting oiled before they get named
By Susan Milius
Two new fish species — with pancake-flat bodies, wiggling lures on their faces, and elbowed fins for “walking” on the seafloor — have been discovered in the path of spewing Gulf of Mexico oil.
One of these pancake batfishes lives in the northern Gulf where oil is already spreading from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, says ichthyologist Prosanta Chakrabarty of Louisiana State University’s Museum of Natural Sciences in Baton Rouge, a codiscoverer of the species.
Chakrabarty calls this narrowly distributed species the Louisiana pancake batfish.
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