Patrick L Jambura, Julia Türtscher, Joshua K Moyer, Kenshu Shimada, Ilija Ćetković, Branko Dragičević, Pero Ugarković, Mišo Pavičić, Phillip C Sternes, Simone Niedermüller, Jacopo Bernardi, Matteo Barbato, Frederik H Mollen, Jürgen Kriwet, Douglas J Long, Taketeru Tomita, Charlie J Underwood, Clinton Duffy, Craig P O'Connell, Alessandro De Maddalena, John Chisholm, Gregory B Skomal
Soldo [1] raises concerns about the reliability of citizen science-derived photographic records for identifying lamnid sharks in the Mediterranean Sea. Using a recently published juvenile white shark from Croatian waters [2] as a representative case, the author reinterprets the specimen as a porbeagle shark (Lamna nasus) rather than a white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), based primarily on selected dental characters. Given the critically endangered status of white sharks in the Mediterranean [3] and the limited number of confirmed observations [4,5], occurrences of the species in this region serve as valuable population data points [6,7] and merit careful examination. Species identifications and reinterpretations should therefore be well-supported, which includes verification of source materials and firsthand communication with citizen scientists, and make use of multiple diagnostic characters whenever possible. Here, we re-examined the specimen using all observable external and dental characters and show that it is consistent with the white shark. We further demonstrate that reliance on single, variably expressed traits-particularly dental characters affected by ontogeny and individual variation-can lead to erroneous identifications, and emphasize that rigorous taxonomic identifications should depend on a holistic, integrative assessment of all available morphological (and if available genetic) evidence.