In recent years, it has been recognised that predatory fishes are rapidly declining in marine habitats. Hence, gathering information on biological characteristics such as dietary dynamics of predatory fishes has assumed importance. Considering this, the dietary dynamics of the predatory ribbonfish Trichiuruslepturusfrom Chennai coast was assessed by analysing the stomach condition and contents, with reference to body size. Representatives of the Order Clupeiformes (Index of relative importance, IRI 33.7%) comprising oilsardine, lesser sardines and anchovies were the major prey items of T. lepturus. Predation by T. lepturus was aided by morphological adaptations, such as dentition, hard and spinous gill rakers, short stomach, high body depth-total length ratio of 1: 17.1 and large mouth (gape area of 1534 mm 2 in adult fish).With increasing body size, the capacity to predate upon relatively larger prey increased. The differences in diet composition between ribbonfish of small, medium and large size were well-represented byIRI, prey specific abundance and cluster analysis. The fish is a top predator (trophic level: 4.17) and a specialist feeder (niche breadth: 2.63). As specialist feeders have a narrow choice of food, they are more vulnerable to fishing. It is important that management of multispecies fisheries should focus more on the sensitive predatory species.

Goatfishes (Family: Mullidae) are commercially important fishery resource along the Chennai coast, south-eastern India.Species-level identification of goatfishes is a challenge, particularly in the ‘vittatus’ group, as there is severe overlapof taxonomic characteristics. In 2010, Uiblein and Heemstra revised the Family Mullidae and reported the occurrenceof Upeneus supravittatus along the Indian coast. They also remarked that U. supravittatus has been misidentified asU. taeniopterus in earlier reports from India. To resolve this and verify the occurrence of U. supravittatus, 15 morphometriccharacteristics and 13 meristic characteristics of goatfish samples collected at Chennai were analysed and compared withthe corresponding data reported by Uiblein and Heemstra for U. taeniopterus and four other ‘vittatus’ group goat fishes. Theanalysis, as well as DNA bar coding and area of distribution of species confirmed the samples as Upeneus supravittatus.The gill raker count on the upper and lower limbs of first gill arch was an important key in identifying the species. Thoughthe number of gill rakers was almost similar for U. supravittatus, U. vittatus and U. taeniopterus, the size and position ofthe gill rakers confirmed that the collected samples were all U. supravittatus. The study also indicates the possibility thatU. supravittatus has been hitherto wrongly reported as U. taeniopterus. A detailed taxonomic study on the Family Mullidaeneeds to be undertaken along the Indian coast using morphometric and meristic characteristics and DNA barcoding toresolve these taxonomic issues. Keywords: DNA barcoding, Gill rakers, Species identification, ‘vittatus’ group