First record of scamp, Mycteroperca phenax, in the north-eastern Atlantic
An adult specimen of Mycteroperca sp. previously unrecorded was collected from the Azores Islands. Based on comparison of morphological characters and the cytochrome bmitochondrial gene, the specimen was identi¢ed as the western Atlantic species M. phenax, a species previously unrecorded from the ce...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.521.6621 http://www.horta.uac.pt/ppl/tmorato/pdf/morato et al 2004a.pdf |
| Summary: | An adult specimen of Mycteroperca sp. previously unrecorded was collected from the Azores Islands. Based on comparison of morphological characters and the cytochrome bmitochondrial gene, the specimen was identi¢ed as the western Atlantic species M. phenax, a species previously unrecorded from the central or eastern Atlantic Ocean. The Azores archipelago, located from 368550N 25801W to 398430N 318150W, are the most isolated islands in the North Atlantic, approximately 1000 nautical miles from the nearest continent. Despite major oceanographic current £ow from west to east, the Azorean marine ichthyofauna fauna has stronger biogeographic a⁄nities with the eastern Atlantic than the west mainly with the archipelagos of Madeira and the Canaries, and to a lesser extent with continental coasts of north-west Africa, southern Europe, and the Mediterranean (Santos et al., 1995). Mycteroperca Gill, 1863 (Serranidae: Epinephelinae) is a wide-ranging genus with 15 currently recognized species: two in the eastern Atlantic, eight in the western Atlantic and ¢ve in the eastern Paci¢c (Heemstra & Randall, 1993). In the Azores and the eastern Atlantic the genus is represented by only one species in each of those areas; the island grouper Mycteroperca fusca Lowe, 1836 and mottled grouper M. rubra Bloch, 1793, respectively (Heemstra & Randall, 1993). In this paper we report the occur-rence of an unknown Mycteroperca species in the north-eastern |
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