Hippocampus mohnikei, Bleeker 1853

Sara A. Lourie, Riley A. Pollom & Sarah J. Foster, 2016, A global revision of the Seahorses Hippocampus Rafinesque 1810 (Actinopterygii: Syngnathiformes): Taxonomy and biogeography with recommendations for further research, Zootaxa 4146 (1), pp. 1-66 : 33-34

H. mohnikei Bleeker 1853

English common names. Japanese Seahorse.

Synonyms. H. japonicus Kaup 1856 .

Distribution. Cambodia, China (including Province of Taiwan), India (eastern), Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and Viet Nam (see Aylesworth et al. 2016).

Holotype. RMNH 7259.

Type locality. Kaminoseki Island , Japan.

Notes. Both H. mohnikei and H. japonicus were described from Japan and examination of their type specimens shows them to be the same species (Appendix J). Specimens from elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific morphologically conform to H. mohnikei , and differ genetically (e.g. Japanese and Vietnamese specimens differ by an average of 2.25%—648 bp, CO1, BOLD 2016), indicating that there is the possibility of cryptic species within what we know as H. mohnikei . Zhang et al. (2014) found an overall nucleotide diversity of 0.35% between the two populations sampled from northern China (780 bp, cyt b).