Record of Nemipterus randalli Russell, 1986 from the southern Aegean Sea (Gokova Bay, Turkey)

Abstract

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, many species of Indian Ocean origin migrated through the canal, entering the eastern Mediterranean Sea. A variety of such migrant fish species spread across the Mediterranean to form self-sustaining populations (Erguden et al., 2009). This phenomenon is called Lessepsian migration, named after Ferdinand de Lesseps, the engineer and developer of the canal. One of these Lessepsian species is Nemipterus randalli (Nemipteridae). Originally restricted to the Indo-West-Pacific region, the Nemipteridae include five genera consisting of 62 species (Russell, 1990).

Nemipterus randalli is widely spread throughout the Western Indian Ocean region, covering the east and west coasts of India, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, Red Sea including the Gulf of Aqaba, the Gulf of Aden, East African coasts, the Seychelles and Madagascar (Russell, 1990; Bilecenoglu and Russell, 2008). Lelli et al. (2008) added the Levant of the Mediterranean Sea to the above geographic distributions.

First captured in Haifa Bay, Israel, N. randalli was mistakenly identified by Golani and Sonin (2006) as N. japonicus. Two years later, Lelli et al. (2008) captured N. randalli on the southern Lebanese coast. The first records of the species in Turkey were from Iskenderun Bay (Bilecenoglu and Russell, 2008) and Antalya Bay (Gokoglu et al., 2009). The 2012 recording of this species is from Gökova Bay, in the southeastern Aegean Sea, showing a further spread of N. randalli in the Mediterranean Sea.