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One fish, two fish, red fish — Mr. Snuffleupagus fish?
A new species of ghost pipefish resembling the beloved star “Sesame Street” character — now officially named Solenostomus snuffleupagus — has recently been discovered by research scientists, with the show creators supporting the fish’s matching moniker.
The fish, whose identifying characteristics include a lengthy snout and orange filaments that look like hair, was seen for the first time back in 2001 by Dr. David Harasati, the principal research scientist at Australia’s Port Stephens Fisheries Institute.
He initially saw the fish — whose unique appearance left him “perplexed” — while on a diving trip in Papua New Guinea after wading through some coral. After taking a few pictures during the dive, he went home and flipped through all his fish books to see if he could identify the creature, but found himself stumped when “nothing matched,” he said.
“I realized we might be looking at something entirely new to science,” Harasati said in a statement obtained by People. “You don’t often get a moment like that in your career, where you realize you could be looking at a species no one has ever documented before.”
Nearly 20 years passed before Harasati would get the opportunity to come across the elusive ghost pipefish again. In 2020, after learning of a sighting of the creature in the city of Cairns in northern Australia, Harasati and his research partner Grant Short set out to track down the fish — successfully capturing a male and female pair to examine them properly, according to Popular Science.
Now, the ghost pipefish — which has been determined to be a completely new species — has been described in the science journal Fish Biology for the first time.
Perhaps the most exciting element of documenting the fish took place last year, when Harasati and Short approached Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind “Sesame Street,” and asked for the honor of naming the furry, orange fish after Big Bird’s BFF — a request with which the team was “delighted.”
“Connecting science with imagination and discovery is what ‘Sesame Street’ has always been about,” Rosemarie Truglio, Ph.D, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of global education, said.
