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Natural History: New species of vegetarian Piranha discovered in the amazon and given the name, sauron after Lord of the Rings villain
13 June 2024
By Sarah Hagen
By Sarah Hagen
A young Myloplus sauron from Xingu River basin © Mark H. Sabaj
A new species of vegetarian piranha has been formally described and named after the Lord of the Rings villain, Sauron, due to the round body and vertical black band on its side which looks like the fictional eye that sits atop the tower of Barad-dûr in Mordor in Tolkien’s trilogy.
Myloplus sauron is found only in the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon River, South America. It eats mainly plants and has human-like teeth to suit its diet. The fish is one of two new species recently named by scientists as part of an effort to better understand piranhas and their relatives and to estimate fish biodiversity living in and around the Amazon River. As many as 42 percent of the fish found there are thought to be unknown to science.
Lead author Dr Rupert Collins, Senior Curator in Charge of fish at the Museum, helped to describe the species, which although closely related to piranhas is in fact better known as a “pacu”, the common name usually used for the piranha’s vegetarian relatives.
Rupert commented: “As soon as my colleagues suggested the name for this fish, we knew it was perfect for it. It looks just like the Eye of Sauron, especially with the red fins and orange patches on its body.
“With so much undescribed biodiversity in the Amazon and surrounding rivers, it’s so important to highlight just how little we know about many of the animals we share our world with, even just basic things like what they look like and where they live. In order to protect the biodiversity we share the Earth with, we must first understand it.
Myloplus sauron was discovered as part of wider efforts to catalogue Amazon biodiversity and understand human impacts in the region.
The Amazon’s Xingu River basin contains over 600 species of fishes, including over 70 endemic species found nowhere else in the world. The river drains a catchment area larger than France and has a single stretch of rapids of over 130 km in length.
This study sought to investigate piranhas and their relatives, a family of fish renowned for being difficult to tell apart, found in this area. The confusion is due to them changing their appearance as they grow, males and females often looking quite different, and many of the same characteristics tending to pop up in different species due to the process of convergent evolution.
One of the more recognisable pacus is Myloplus schomburgkii, a widely distributed species with a bold black band down its side. However, when scientists delved deeper, they found several distinct genetic groups in the species that could be distinguished by anatomy too.
Using a combination of different types of data, such as morphology, genetics and ecology, to describe new species is called “integrative taxonomy”, and this holistic approach is often more powerful than using just one line of evidence alone. Using this approach, the team identified two new species, Myloplus sauron and Myloplus aylan, and redescribed Myloplus schomburgkii.
“Museum collections are critical to biodiversity science because of how difficult it is to use a scientific name when we don’t know what that name represents, i.e. what that species is supposed to look like. Fixing these historical problems allows us to move forward and accelerate the discovery and cataloguing of new biodiversity.” says Rupert.
The findings of the study “Integrative taxonomy of the black-barred disk pacus (Characiformes: Serrasalmidae), including the redescription of Myloplus schomburgkii and the description of two new species” was published in the journal Neotropical Ichthyology and can be accessed from that time here.
Myloplus sauron is found only in the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon River, South America. It eats mainly plants and has human-like teeth to suit its diet. The fish is one of two new species recently named by scientists as part of an effort to better understand piranhas and their relatives and to estimate fish biodiversity living in and around the Amazon River. As many as 42 percent of the fish found there are thought to be unknown to science.
Lead author Dr Rupert Collins, Senior Curator in Charge of fish at the Museum, helped to describe the species, which although closely related to piranhas is in fact better known as a “pacu”, the common name usually used for the piranha’s vegetarian relatives.
Rupert commented: “As soon as my colleagues suggested the name for this fish, we knew it was perfect for it. It looks just like the Eye of Sauron, especially with the red fins and orange patches on its body.
“With so much undescribed biodiversity in the Amazon and surrounding rivers, it’s so important to highlight just how little we know about many of the animals we share our world with, even just basic things like what they look like and where they live. In order to protect the biodiversity we share the Earth with, we must first understand it.
Myloplus sauron was discovered as part of wider efforts to catalogue Amazon biodiversity and understand human impacts in the region.
The Amazon’s Xingu River basin contains over 600 species of fishes, including over 70 endemic species found nowhere else in the world. The river drains a catchment area larger than France and has a single stretch of rapids of over 130 km in length.
This study sought to investigate piranhas and their relatives, a family of fish renowned for being difficult to tell apart, found in this area. The confusion is due to them changing their appearance as they grow, males and females often looking quite different, and many of the same characteristics tending to pop up in different species due to the process of convergent evolution.
One of the more recognisable pacus is Myloplus schomburgkii, a widely distributed species with a bold black band down its side. However, when scientists delved deeper, they found several distinct genetic groups in the species that could be distinguished by anatomy too.
Using a combination of different types of data, such as morphology, genetics and ecology, to describe new species is called “integrative taxonomy”, and this holistic approach is often more powerful than using just one line of evidence alone. Using this approach, the team identified two new species, Myloplus sauron and Myloplus aylan, and redescribed Myloplus schomburgkii.
“Museum collections are critical to biodiversity science because of how difficult it is to use a scientific name when we don’t know what that name represents, i.e. what that species is supposed to look like. Fixing these historical problems allows us to move forward and accelerate the discovery and cataloguing of new biodiversity.” says Rupert.
The findings of the study “Integrative taxonomy of the black-barred disk pacus (Characiformes: Serrasalmidae), including the redescription of Myloplus schomburgkii and the description of two new species” was published in the journal Neotropical Ichthyology and can be accessed from that time here.
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