Moonfish
Moonfish | ||||||||||||
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Mene maculata on sale in a supermarket in the Philippines. |
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Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
Paleocene to date | ||||||||||||
65 to 0 million years | ||||||||||||
Locations | ||||||||||||
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Systematics | ||||||||||||
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Scientific name of the family | ||||||||||||
Menidae | ||||||||||||
Fitzinger , 1873 | ||||||||||||
Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
Mene | ||||||||||||
Lacépède , 1803 |
The moon perch ( Mene ) are a species and family of fish that are extinct except for one species. They are known to be fossilized since the Paleocene . The oldest species is Mene purdyi from Peru . Several fossil species from the Lower Eocene were found in the fossil site of Monte Bolca near Verona in Italy .
There is only one living species left today, Mene maculata , which lives in the Indo-Pacific from the coast of East Africa to southern Japan and the coast of northeastern Australia . The fish live near the coast above the continental shelf and near large islands at depths of 50 to 200 meters. They also go into the brackish water of the estuaries. Mene maculata feeds on bottom-dwelling invertebrates. The fish, which grow to a length of 30 centimeters, are fished commercially and come fresh or dried on the market.
features
Moonfish have a disc-shaped shape (μήνη "moon") and are flattened laterally, with a pronounced, deeply arched chest and stomach region. The ventral fins of adult fish are long and thread-like. The anal fin has no hard rays and is supported by 30 to 33 soft rays. It extends from the base of the pelvic fins to the root of the caudal fin, but is very low. The caudal fin is deeply forked, the dorsal fin is supported by 43 to 45 soft rays and is only low.
Systematics
The systematic position of the moon bass was uncertain for a long time. They have already been placed as a separate order, Meniformes and close to the Tetraodontiformes (which are then regarded as prepercomorphs) and the Beryciformes . They were later placed in the order of the perch-like . Betancur-R. and employees assigned them to the Carangaria in their revision of the system of bony fish published in spring 2013 .
literature
- Joseph S. Nelson : Fishes of the World. Wileys, Hoboken 2006. ISBN 0-471-25031-7 .
Individual evidence
- Jump up ↑ Matt Friedmann & G. David Johnson: A new species of Mene from the Paleocene of South America (en./pdf) Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 25 (4): 770-783. 2005 doi : 10.1671 / 0272-4634 (2005) 025 [0770: ANSOMP] 2.0.CO; 2
- ↑ Ricardo Betancur-R, Edward O. Wiley, Gloria Arratia, Arturo Acero, Nicolas Bailly, Masaki Miya, Guillaume Lecointre and Guillermo Ortí: Phylogenetic classification of bony fishes . BMC Evolutionary Biology, BMC series - July 2017, DOI: 10.1186 / s12862-017-0958-3
Web links
- Moonfish on Fishbase.org (English)