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International Journal of Marine Science 2014, Vol.4, No.28, 253-258
http://ijms.biopublisher.ca
253
A Letter Open Access
First Records of
Opisthognathus muscatensis
Boulenger, 1888 (Opisthognathidae),
Trachinotus baillonii
(Lacepède, 1801) (Carangidae), and
Atrobucca nibe
(Jordan & Thompson, 1911) (Sciaenidae) off the Iraq Coast, Arabian Gulf
Sadek Hussain
1
, Laith A. Jawad
2
1. Department of Fisheries and marine Resources, College of Agriculture, University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq
2. Manukau, Auckland, New Zealand
Corresponding author email
International Journal of Marine Science, 2014, Vol.4, No.28 doi: 10.5376/ijms.2014.04.0028
Received: 10 Feb., 2014
Accepted: 15 Mar., 2014
Published: 17 May, 2014
Copyright
©
2014 Hussain and Jawad, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Preferred citation for this article:
Hussain and Jawad, 2014, First Records of
Opisthognathus muscatensis
Boulenger, 1888 (Opisthognathidae),
Trachinotus baillonii
(Lacepède, 1801)
(Carangidae), and
Atrobucca nibe
(Jordan & Thompson, 1911) (Sciaenidae) off the Iraq Coast, Arabian Gulf, International Journal of Marine Science, Vol.4,
No.28 253
-
258 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2014.04.0028)
Abstract
The present paper reports the first records of,
Opisthognathus muscatensis
,
Trachinotus baillonii
and
Atrobucca nibe
from
the Arabian Gulf coast of Iraq.
Keywords
Teleostei; Actinopterygii; Arabian Gulf; Basrah; Distribution; Range extension
Introduction
The era when the old Mesopotamian, Sumerian,
Babylonian and Assyrian natives described fish
species by name marks the history of the study of the
fish fauna of Iraq (Saggs, 1962). These people
successfully recorded their findings on clay tablets
(Landsberger, 1962). However, the modern taxonomy
did not start until the 19th century, when Heckel (1843)
described 17 freshwater fish species from the Tigris
River at Mosul City, northern Iraq. The beginning of
the late first half of the 20
th
century witnessed the
emergence of the taxonomy of marine fish fauna of
Iraq. Among the first works are those of Kennedy
(1937), Hora and Misra (1943) and Misra (1947).
Until the mid of the second half of the 20
th
century the
appearance of such studieswere evident (Al-Daham,
1982, Banister, 1980, Banister and Buni, 1980,
Hussain et al., 1988, Al-Hassan and Al-Badri, 1986;
Al-Hassan and Muhsin, 1986), but political situation
proclaimed the start of their decline and the scientific
explorations in general, and the fish taxonomy in
particular, became to halt (Jawad, 2012). The Iraqi
coast suffered a severe lack of comprehensive
ichthyological explorations. Consequenlty, the present
study is part of a program that includes a thorough
survey of the Iraqi marine fish.
In this paper, we report the first records of the robust
jawfish,
Opisthognathus muscatensis
, the small
spotted dart,
Trachinotus baillonii
and the blackmouth
croaker,
Atrobucca nibe
, from the Arabian Gulf
waters of Iraq.
1 Material and methods
Fish specimens were obtained by small trawlers in the
Iraqi marine waters of the Arabian Gulf (Figure 1).
Morphometric and meristic data were recorded
following Fischer and Bianchi (1984). Standard length
(SL), recorded from tip of snout to base of caudal fin,
was used for proportional measurements, and total
length (TL) was recored from snout to the border of
Figure 1 Map showing the collection site