Professor Bradley Wetherbee discovered and named a new species of shark after his daughter Laila, both pictured above. Photo courtesy of Bradley Wetherbee.
University of Rhode Island Professor Dr. Bradley Wetherbee worked for 29 years studying a new species of sharks, which he named Laila’s Lantern Shark after his 17-year-old daughter, Laila Mostello-Wetherbee.
Wetherbee first saw this species in 1988 when members of the National Marine Fisheries Service were conducting a study in Hawaii. They were setting lines for a certain type of fish and instead were catching strange types of sharks. They boxed about 15 of them and offered them to Wetherbee, who was studying sharks in the area at the time.
He accepted and organized them based off of the species, sending them to a museum in Honolulu where they could be studied further. It wasn’t until the species were studied closely at the museum that the idea they were a new type of shark was even brought up.
“I was working with this guy who was a taxonomist and knew a lot about these lantern sharks,” Wetherbee said. “He said ‘I think you’ve got some different species, these species aren’t what you’re calling them and they’re probably new species.’”
Wetherbee and his colleagues gathered specimens from species from around the world. These specimens were from typical lantern sharks, which the researchers originally thought these sharks were.
They took measurements and other information from these specimens and compared them to the species being studied, and determined that it was a new type of shark that had never been described before. It wasn’t until nearly 30 years later, in 2017, that the scientific papers describing and naming the new shark were officially published.
“It takes a while, you know there are some closely related species,” Wetherbee said. “There are almost 40 different species [of lantern sharks] out there that have been described already. Some of them obviously have some characteristics; their scales, markings or size, so there’s some that you can eliminate already. There is a handful of species that are very similar to Laila’s Lantern Shark so what you have to do is get specimens of those in hand and compare them.”
Laila’s Lantern Sharks can be found up to three feet long and typically have a longer nose than other lantern sharks. They are typically a deep sea fish and are found in dark areas of the ocean, at depths in excess of 1,000 feet.
“There are only 500 and something species of sharks, and for the vast majority I don’t know how many of them are named after anybody, but I don’t think very many,” Wetherbee said. “So it’s kind of a novel thing, it’s not like having a snail named after you or a butterfly or something. It’s different than some other kind of gift I could have given to her.”
Laila Mostello-Wetherbee is a senior in high school in Rhode Island. According to Mostello-Wetherbee, she was only about ten-years-old when she first learned a shark was being named after her and didn’t fully appreciate it.
“At first when I was younger I wasn’t that excited,” Mostello-Wetherbee said. “But now I see it’s pretty cool. I just don’t think I realized that it’s something that would last forever.”
Wetherbee also mentioned that there were other types of unidentified species found in the boxes with Laila’s Lantern Sharks. He and his colleagues are continuing to work to describe these types of species by comparing them with specimens retrieved from museums around the world.