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International Journal of Marine Science 2014, Vol.4, No.25, 227-230
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229
Arabian Sea (Ali and McNoon, 2010). In the present
work, this species is reported from the Sea of Oman.
Discussion
The size of the Omani specimen of the keeltail
pomfret lies within that given by Ali and McNoon
(2010) for specimens collected from Aden Gulf and its
standard length is larger than that reported by
Carvalho-Filo et al. (2009) for single specimen caught
in the Brazilian waters of the West Atlantic Ocean.
The other morphometric characters almost agree with
the ranges of other researchers and the meristic traits
are slightly differs from them (Smith, 1965, 1986;
Fischer and Bianchi, 1984; Gomes, 1990; Shao, 2005;
Ali and McNoon, 2010). The Sea of Oman specimen
showed values for dorsal, anal and pectoral fin ray
count that fall in intermediary point of that given for
the Aden Gulf specimens (Ali and McNoon, 2010)
(Table 1).
For the last few decades, the lateral line in this species
was neglected as distinguishing character (Smith 1965,
1986; Gomes 1990). However, it is obviously complete
with constant pores and easy to count (Figure 2, b, c).
This result is in agreement with that of Carvalho-Filo
et al. (2009) and Ali and McNoon (2010).
Carvalho-Filo
et al
. (2009) suggested that the outer
border of the caudal fin’s lower lobe shaped like an
“S” in
T. rubescens
is an additional character that
should be added to the characters of the genus
Taractes
since it is present in the other species of this
genus,
T. asper
. This characters is also observed in the
specimen of Sea of Oman and the specimens for Aden
Gulf (Ali and McNoon, 2010).
Why this species was not recorded previously from
the Omani waters on the Arabian Sea coasts of Oman
might be that an adequate and comprehensive
sampling program
is lacking. The present record of
T.
rubescens
confirms the validity of an increasing effort
to search for fish species. It is premature to assess
whether the present population is represented by only
one visitor of
T. rubescens
simply exploring the new
area, or whether this specimen is part of a
well-established population.
The present and other recent discoveries (Jawad and
Al-Mamry, 2009; Jawad et al., 2010a, b; Jawad, 2011a,
b; Jawad et al., 2013 a, b) indicate that deep waters of
the Sea of Oman has the potential for a lot of
fascinating environmental and biological for oceanic
and deep water marine organisms. Further comprehensive
studies should investigate the frequency of the
occurrence of this species and its biological
characteristics to determine whether any sustainable
population has been established in this new region.
Acknowledgements
Our sincere thanks should go to Ronald Fricke of Staatliches
Museum für Naturkunde, Germany, Kwang-Tsao Shao of
Academia Sinica and Sergey Bogorodsky of Station of
Naturalists, Russia for their confirmation of the identity of the
species. To William Richard, NOAA Fisheries, Florida, USA
for reading the manuscript and having his valuable advice and
suggestions. To Abbas Akbari, Australia for his assistant in
editing the fish images in Photoshop.
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