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International Journal of Marine Science 2014, Vol.4, No.40: 1-5
http://ijms.biopublisher.ca
1
A Letter Open Access
First record of
Antennarius indicus
(Pisces: Batrachoidiformes: Antennaridae),
Equulites elongatus
(Pisces: Perciformes: Leiognathidae) and second record of
Cheilinus lunulatus
(Pisces: Perciformes: Labridae) from the Marine Waters
of Iraq
Laith A. Jawad
1
,
Sadek Hussain
2
1.Manukau, Auckland, New Zealand
2.Department of Fisheries and marine Resources, College of Agriculture, University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq
Corresponding author email
International Journal of Marine Science, 2014, Vol.4, No.40 doi: 10.5376/ijms.2014.04.0040
Received: 13 Jun, 2014
Accepted: 15 Jul., 2014
Published: 28 Jul., 2014
Copyright
©
2014
Laith A. 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:
Jawad and Hussain, 2014, First record of
Antennarius indicus
(Pisces: Batrachoidiformes: Antennaridae),
Equulites elongatus
(Pisces: Perciformes:
Leiognathidae) and second record of
Cheilinus lunulatus
(Pisces: Perciformes: Labridae) from the Marine Waters of Iraq, International Journal of Marine
Science, Vol.4, No.40: 1-5 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2014.04.0040)
Abstract
First records of three fish species from the Iraqi marine waters are reported: Indian frogfish
Antennarius indicus
Schultz, 1964, slender ponyfish
Equulites elongatus
(Günther, 1874)
and second record of broomtail wrasse
Cheilinus lunulatus
(Forsskål, 1775). This record includes the northern distribution report of
A. indicus
and
E. elongatus
and confirmation for the presence
of
C. lunulatus
in the Arabian Gulf waters. This work also includes new size record for
A. indicus
and
E. elongatus
.
Keywords
Range extension; Arabian Gulf; Iraq; Invasion; Antennaridae; Leiognathidae; Labridae
Introduction
Several studies have been published on the marine fish
fauna of Iraq in the last few decades (Khalaf, 1961;
Mahdi, 1962, 1971; Al-Daham, 1982; Al-Hassan and
Al-Badri, 1986; Al-Hassan and Miller, 1987; Hussain
et al., 1988; Hussain and Naama, 1989; Fricke and
Al-Hassan, 1995; Mohammed et al., 62001; Ali 2013a,
b). However it still
remains not fully investigated and
there are large amount of taxonomic works waiting to
be done (Jawad, 2012).
In the recent decade, several programs have been
started to survey the Iraqi waters of the Arabian Gulf
aiming to explore fish diversity of this area and create
a list of species that are present in the northwest part
of the Arabian Gulf.
In the present study the
Antennarius indicus
,
Schultz, 1964
, Cheilinus lunulatus
(Forsskål, 1775),
and
Equulites elongatus
(Günther, 1874) are recorded
from the waters of the Arabian Gulf of Iraq for the first
time. The record of
Antennarius indicus
, Schultz, 1964
and
Equulites elongatus
(Günther, 1874) is considered
the first to the Arabian Gulf area.
1 Materials and Methods
Specimens of
A. indicus
,
E. elongatus
and
C.
lunulatus
were recorded from
the coasts of the city of
Basrah at the north-western corner of the Arabian Gulf
(29º47' N 48º43' E) on 20
th
March 2012. Fish
specimens were obtained by small trawler operating in
the Arabian Gulf and Sea of Oman for commercial
fishing and made available for taxonomic examination
(Figure 1). Morphometric and meristic details
were
recorded following the method described by Pietsch
(1983) and Gomon (1983) and (Kimura et al., 2005)
for
A. indicus
,
C. lunulatus
, and
E. elongatus
respectively. The morphometric and meristic data are
presented in Table 1. The
specimens are deposited in
the fish collection of
the Marine Science and Fisheries
Centre, Ministry
of Fisheries Wealth, Muscat,
Sultanate of Oman,
catalogue number OMMSFC
1230-1232.
2 Results
Antennarius indicus
Total length of ten specimens collected was 120-260 mm
(Figure 2). The morphometric and meristic characters