‘Frozen’ creature washes up on Taiwan beach during cold snap. It’s a new species
In the strait between Taiwan and China, a series of islands makes up Penghu, Taiwan’s smallest county.
Most of the year, the islands’ sandy beaches offer a warm escape from city life. But, sometimes a cold front pushes into the strait, washing cold water from the Pacific Ocean over the normally warm shallows.
In 2022, a northern cold front brought the water temperature around Penghu down to about 57 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a Dec. 9 study published in the peer-reviewed journal ZooKeys.
“Consequently, many coral-reef fishes were frozen to death and washed ashore,” researchers said.
Researchers took to the beach and collected the scores of icicled creatures, according to the study, then brought them back to the lab.
As they sorted and identified the animals, they noticed one fish didn’t quite look like anything they had seen before. The “cold snap” had brought a new species to shore.
The new species belongs to a group called jawfish, small fish found in oceans and seas around the world, according to the study.
“They are well known for their mouth-brooding behavior, in which parents carry their sticky egg mass in their mouth until hatching,” researchers said.
The chilled fish has a “pale” body covered with “dark blotches” and rows of “dark lines,” according to the study.
It is about 2 1/2 inches long, though only one has been identified so far, researchers said.
The new species was named Opistognathus cryos, or the frozen jawfish.
“The specific name cryos, is from the Greek ‘κρύος’ meaning cold or chilled, indicating that the holotype was collected during a cold snap in 2022,” according to the study. “The common name ‘frozen jawfish’ is also a reference to the fantasy film ‘Frozen’ produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios.”
O. cryos most closely resembles a deep-sea species from northwestern Australia, as they both have a rigid upper jaw and dark blotches on the scales, researchers said.
The fish’s “large” head is not only good for holding on to sticky eggs, but jawfish also use their jaws to create their homes, researchers said.
“They are bottom burrowers that inhabit sandy bottoms at depths of (6.5 to 98 feet), with some Indo-West Pacific species down to (about 650 feet), and Caribbean species to at least (984 feet),” according to the study.
The new species was found along the northern shore of the Penghu Islands, researchers said, and another unconfirmed sighting of a frozen jawfish in Japan suggests the fish may have a wider distribution in the northwestern Pacific.
The Penghu Islands are off the western coast of Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait.
The research team includes Yo Su and Hsuan-Ching Ho.
