Pempheris tominagai

Randall, John E., Victor, Benjamin C., Alpermann, Tilman J., Bogorodsky, Sergey V., Mal, Ahmad O., Satapoomin, Ukkrit & Bineesh, K. K., 2014, Rebuttal to Koeda et al. (2014) on the Red Sea fishes of the perciform genus Pempheris, Zootaxa 3887 (3), pp. 377-392 : 387

Status of Pempheris tominagai

Koeda et al. (2014) described the Red Sea representative of the P. schwenkii complex as the new species Pempheris tominagai , and selected a specimen from the Red Sea coast of Egypt as the holotype. It is a valid species, endemic to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (the latter locality based on 22 specimens from the south coast of Yemen, SMF 35489 and NHCY-P-10). Koeda et al. (2014) claim P. tominagai to be the Indian Ocean sister species of P. schwenkii of the Pacific. This cannot be true because the type locality of P. schwenkii is the Batu Islands off the SW coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. Of the eight records listed in their synonymy for P. tominagai , only a single one ( Siliotti, 2009) is valid as this species. They included the record of P. schwenkii by Heemstra & Heemstra (2004: 326–327) as P. tominagai , but Heemstra & Heemstra's material is now known to consist of two undescribed species of Pempheris . Koeda et al. ’s (2014) Fig. 7a, an underwater photo of an aggregation of Pempheris taken by Gerald R. Allen in Madagascar, is also an undescribed species, not P. tominagai . Furthermore, the description of P. tominagai is flawed, because many of the paratypes designated by Koeda et al. (2014) have proven to be an undescribed species of Pempheris from Southern Africa and Madagascar, more than 15% different in COI sequence from P. tominagai of the Red Sea (15.6% K2P distance, 13.7% pairwise; Makinen & Heemstra (pers. comm.); note Koeda et al. would have been unaware of this). Koeda et al. (2014) reported the posterior nostril of P. tominaga compressed in contrast to the anterior, illustrated as their Fig. 8. However, we are unable to confirm this character. Of our five Red Sea specimens of this species, only one has the posterior nostril narrower than the anterior on both sides, none has the nostril completely closed as their Fig. 8 b. Of the 22 specimens from the Gulf of Aden, only 5 have one nostril fully compressed on one side.