''Myxine fernholmi'' (''Myxine'': Ancient Greek word for slimy fish), also known as Fernholm's hagfish, is a

species A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...

jawless fish Agnatha (; ) or jawless fish is a paraphyletic infraphylum of animals in the subphylum Vertebrata of the phylum Chordata, characterized by the lack of jaws. The group consists of both extant taxon, living (Cyclostomi, cyclostomes such as hagfish ...

in the family Myxinidae. It is named after Swedish ichthyologist Bo Fernholm.

Details

It is found around the

Falkland Islands The Falkland Islands (; ), commonly referred to as The Falklands, is an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean on the Patagonian Shelf. The principal islands are about east of South America's southern Patagonian coast and from Cape Dub ...

and the Burdwood Bank, with a single specimen also known from central

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in western South America. It is the southernmost country in the world and the closest to Antarctica, stretching along a narrow strip of land between the Andes, Andes Mountains and the Paci ...

, off the coast of

San Antonio San Antonio ( ; Spanish for " Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the third-largest metropolitan area in Texas and the 24th-largest metropolitan area in the ...

. Although only 4 specimens have been caught, high densities of hagfish that are assumed to be this species have been recorded at depths of on surveys of the scavenging fauna of the

Patagonian Shelf The Patagonian Shelf — sometimes referred to as Argentine Shelf — is part of the South American continental shelf belonging to the Argentine Sea on the Atlantic seaboard, south of about 35°S. It adjoins the coasts of Argentina and Urugu ...

. As it lives beyond the depth of major fishing trawlers in the region and there are no known direct threats to it, it is considered

Least Concern A least-concern species is a species that has been evaluated and categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as not being a focus of wildlife conservation because the specific species is still plentiful in the wil ...

on the

IUCN Red List The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is an inventory of the global conservation status and extinction risk of biological ...

. The complete mitogenome of this species was analyzed for the first time in 2019.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q4737443 Myxinidae Fish of Chile Fauna of the Falkland Islands Fish described in 1995