Serranus Cuvier, 1817

Iwamoto, Tomio & Wirtz, Peter, 2018, A Synopsis of the Eastern and Central Atlantic Combers of the Genus Serranus (Teleostei: Scorpaeniformes: Serranidae), Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 65 (1), pp. 1-39 : 3

Genus Serranus Cuvier, 1817

Type species Perca cabrilla Linnaeus, 1758 (as designated by ICZN, Official List, Opinion 93) .

DIAGNOSIS.— D X,12–15; A III,6–8, usually 7; P 12–18; V I,5; BR 7; vertebrae 10+14. Dorsal fin undivided, spinous and soft rays broadly united; caudal fin truncate, emarginate, or moderately forked, with 17 principal rays (15 branched); supramaxilla absent; teeth on vomer and palatines, none on tongue. Opercle with two or (usually) three flattened spines, the lowermost sometimes obscure or undeveloped; central spine largest and directed horizontally. A spinousedged suprascapular scale present. Scales mostly ctenoid, but some species have cycloid scales on head or trunk and S. drewesi n. sp. has all scales cycloid; interorbit, occiput, upper part of postorbital region and interopercle variously scaled or naked; lateral line complete, with pored scales; maxilla naked. Species probably all synchronous hermaphrodites. Most species small, less than 20 cm TL, but a few attain about 40 cm TL (mostly from Robins and Starck, 1961:261).

REMARKS.— Members of the genus are found on both sides of the Atlantic (including the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and in the Red Sea as an invasive), in the tropical eastern Pacific, and in the southwestern Indian Ocean off South Africa. The highest diversity is found in the western central Atlantic (14 spp.), followed by the eastern Atlantic (10 spp.), the eastern Pacific (6 spp.), and the Indian Ocean (2 spp.). The species are apparently endemic to each region, as no species is found in more than one region. Kuiter (2004:80) listed 30 described species of Serranus and two undescribed species, but one of the described species he listed is Chelidoperca africana Cadenat, 1960 , which we consider as the only member of Chelidoperca in the Atlantic. Chelidoperca is otherwise known from 10 other species of the Indo-West Pacific ( Matsunuma et al. 2018). Table 1 lists 32 species of Serranus , based on Kuiter (loc. cit.) and our findings.

Robins and Starck (1961) comprehensively treated the western Atlantic species of Serranus and provided valuable additional information on the genus, its included species, and relationships to other serranines; they also gave excellent descriptions of three eastern Atlantic species for which they had specimens. They considered that the anal fin-ray count of III,7 was the common number, but we found that our two specimens of S. atricauda had III,8, as did one of our specimens of S. scriba (CAS-SU 20897). Meisler (1987:152) stated that, S. atricauda “is the only Serranus species to have exclusively eight anal rays.“ Heemstra and Anderson (2016:2410) gave the anal fin-ray count for S. hepatus as III,6 or 7, but seven of our 10 specimens of that species had a count of III,7; the other had III,6. The holotype and only specimen of S. drewesi n.sp. has an anal fin-ray count of III,6.

It is regrettable that Martin R. Meisler’s Ph.D. dissertation (1987) was never published inasmuch as it is a comprehensive revisionary work on the group, based on study of most of the species of Serranus and Mentiperca (as well as numerous other serranid genera) and a phylogenetic analysis using a variety of osteological, myological, and external characters. It contains a wealth of original information not elsewhere available and the bibliography is comprehensive to that time.