Muraena helena Linnaeus 1758

Smith, David G., Bogorodsky, Sergey V., Mal, Ahmad O. & Alpermann, Tilman J., 2019, Review of the moray eels (Anguilliformes: Muraenidae) of the Red Sea, with description of a new species, Zootaxa 4704 (1), pp. 1-87 : 60-61

Muraena helena Linnaeus 1758 —Mediterranean Moray

( Figure 39 )

Muraena helena Linnaeus 1758: 244 (Europe; America). Syntypes, ZMUU Linn. Coll. 57 (1, only surviving specimen).— Randall & Golani 1995: 869; Golani & Bogorodsky 2010: 10; Golani & Fricke 2018: 23.

Red Sea material. Egypt: HUJ 9048 (2, 650–880), Nuweiba; HUJ 9012 (1, 545), Nuweiba.

Comparative material. Mediterranean Sea: HUJ 15173 (2, 310–412), Cyprus; HUJ 16192 (1, 520), Israel.

Description. In TL: preanal length 2.1–2.2, predorsal length 9.7–10, head length 8.2–8.7, body depth at anus 15. In head length: snout length 4.6–5.2, eye diameter 9.3–12, upper-jaw length 2.3–2.6. Pores: LL 2, SO 3, IO 4, POM 6. Vertebrae: total 144–145 (137–146 for 15 specimens reported by E. B. Böhlke, as stated by Randall & Golani 1995).

Body moderate; anus slightly before midlength; dorsal-fin origin before gill opening. Snout moderate, jaws of equal length. Eye moderate, over middle of upper jaw. Anterior nostril tubular; posterior nostril long and tubular, its length almost half eye diameter, above anterior margin of eye.

Teeth uniserial, conical to triangular, pointed, smooth. Intermaxillary teeth in a single peripheral series; 2–3 median teeth. Vomerine teeth sharply conical.

Color: anterior half of head dark brown, the posterior half and anterior trunk mottled with whitish flecks and short irregular lines; posterior trunk and tail with three longitudinal rows of large whitish blotches, each with a clustering of very dark brown spots and white dots. Posterior margin of fins with a series of small hemispherical whitish spots. Edge of gill opening blackish.

Maximum size to 1.3 m.

Distribution and habitat. Eastern Atlantic from the British Isles to Senegal, including the Mediterranean and the islands. An immigrant to the northern Red Sea via the Suez Canal; three specimens collected from Nuweiba, Gulf of Aqaba.

Remarks. The genus Muraena is characterized by the long posterior nostril, a feature it shares with Enchelycore pardalis , a species that does not occur in the Red Sea. The Red Sea specimens do not differ in any meaningful way from those in the Atlantic, and they undoubtedly represent migrants that entered the Red Sea through the Suez Canal. The COI sequence of a specimen from the Mediterranean included in the phylogenetic analysis showed that the morphological similarity between Muraena helena and Enchelycore pardalis is accompanied by a relatively close phylogenetic affiliation of these two species in that they formed a moderately well supported joint clade ( Fig. 48 ).

Figures

FIGURE 39. Muraena helena, Bodrum, Turkey. Photo by S.V. Bogorodsky.

FIGURE 48. Unrooted maximum likelihood phylogeny of Indo-Pacific moray eels (Muraenidae) based on partial mitochondrial COI. Branch support values were obtained by 100 bootstrapped replicates; only bootstrap values above 50 percent are shown. The scale bar represents average number of nucleotide substitutions. (A) = specimen sequenced in this study; (B) = sequence retrieved from BOLD; (C) sequence retrieved from CRIOBE; (G) = sequence retrieved from GenBank; (R) = sequence retrieved from Reece et al. (2010); (ID) = species ID re-assigned herein; (ID-H) = specimen re-assigned as of Huang et al. (2019); (SAU) = collected in Saudi Arabia; (ISR) = collected in Israel.