The first record of the pharaoh cardinal fish, Apogonichthyoides pharaonis (Actinopterygii: Perciformes: Apogonidae), from Libyan waters

Abstract

The occurrence of the pharaoh cardinalfish, Apogonichthyoides pharaonis (Bellotti, 1874), is documented for the first time from the Libyan waters, after two subsequent findings reported in September and November 2020 in the far eastern region of the country. The location of these findings represents the westernmost area of distribution in the southern Mediterranean for this species, which has the western Indian Ocean and Red Sea origin and which entered into the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal.

The westernmost record of Terapon jarbua (Forsskål, 1775) in the Mediterranean Sea: a new non-indigenous fish for Libya

“…In recent years, citizen science and social media have contributed greatly to the monitoring and early detection of non-indigenous species in the Mediterranean Sea (Al Mabruk et al, 2018;Al Mabruk and Rizgalla, 2019;Azzurro and Tiralongo, 2020;Osca et al, 2020;Tiralongo et al, 2019Tiralongo et al, , 2020Al Mabruk et al, 2021b;Tiralongo et al, 2021). The strategic geographical location of Libya at about the center of the southern Mediterranean Sea and bordering with Egypt, makes this region a key area for the monitoring of tropical organisms arriving from both the Red Sea (Lessepsian immigrants) and Atlantic Ocean (Shakman et al, 2017;Al Mabruk et al, 2020, 2021c. On the basis of this, more studies targeting alien species should be performed in this area.…”

First report of Ernogrammus zhirmunskii Markevich & Kharin, 2011 (Perciformes: Stichaeidae) in Dokdo, Korea

“…Most unrecorded species so far have been documented as larger specimens, collected by commercial fishing gears (Al Mabruk et al, 2021;Lombarte et al, 2021). While small fish species are relatively unrevealed due to difficulty of sampling, this group of species is mostly hard to find or collect because of their small size and hiding behavior between crevices of rocks.…”