Himantura leoparda, Manjaji-Matsumoto & Last, 2008

Golzarianpour, Kiavash, Malek, Masoumeh, Golestaninasab, Mehdi, Sarafrazi, Alimorad, Kochmann, Judith & Klimpel, Sven, 2020, Insights into the Urogymnid whiprays (Chondrichthyes: Batoidea) in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, with an amendment of their diagnostic characteristics and dispersal range, Zootaxa 4819 (2), pp. 316-334 : 330

Himantura leoparda or Himantura uarnak?

Both species, H. leopard and H. uarnak , have an extended dispersal range within the Indo-west Pacific ( Last et al. 2016b), which indicates an overlap of their habitat. Although Almoji et al. (2015) noted that there is a species complex, they reported H. uarnak as the only valid species in the Persian Gulf and misidentified the photo of H. leoparda as H. uarnak . Recently, Jabado et al. (2018) recorded well-documented data on the presence of both species in UAE waters. Their conservative frequency estimation counted more individuals of H. uarnak than H. leoparda . Despite higher frequency of H. uarnak , we never succeeded in capturing this species from northern waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Henderson et al. (2016) and Last et al. (2016a) sequenced several specimens of H. leoparda from Oman, Bahrain, and Iran. Unfortunately, these sequence data have not been deposited in Gen-Bank, which prevented us from doing a precise comparison. Moreover, the specimens sequenced here are closely grouped with H. leoparda (GN4575) from Indonesia with an average p-distance of 1.85 ±0.1%. Henderson et al. (2016) considered this amount of difference as an intraspecific variation.