Nine years after throwing his support behind an initiative aimed at protecting sharks and their habitats, Paul Allen has a namesake shark.
Sphyrna alleni is a new hammerhead shark species named for the late Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, according to a news release Monday from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
Allen funded Global Finprint, a global reef shark survey that launched in 2015 to collect information about where sharks were in trouble, where they were doing well, and where taking action would have the greatest impact.
The existence of the new species was hidden because it looks so similar to another species, the bonnethead shark, Sphyrna tiburo, according to Cindy Gonzalez, a Florida International University researcher and lead author of an article in Zootaxa that formally describes the Sphyrna alleni.
Demian Chapman, co-lead of Global Finprint and director of Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research, led the research team that identified the shark.
Gonzalez, a native Colombian marine ecologist, was studying bonnethead sharks in Panama in 2015 as part of her master’s research project. She worked with Chapman, then her Ph.D. advisor at FIU, on the subject, since Latin America is the global hub for small hammerhead shark species. The new species ranges from Belize to Brazil, and since most of the research on it was done in Belize its common name is the shovelbill shark to reflect what the people of Belize call it.
Working with scientists and shark fishers, Gonzalez learned how the new shark differs from the bonnethead shark in terms of its head shape and the number of vertebrae it has, as well as its highly distinctive DNA profile.
Studies including Global FinPrint show sharks are overfished in Latin America, especially where destructive fishing gear such as gillnets are used and there is poor governance of the fisheries sector, according to the Allen Family Foundation.
