Pancake batfish

Pancake batfish
Halieutichthys aculeatus, conventional and X-ray images
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Lophiiformes
Family: Ogcocephalidae
Genus: Halieutichthys
Species: H. aculeatus
Binomial name
Halieutichthys aculeatus
(Mitchill, 1818)

The pancake batfish (Halieutichthys aculeatus) belongs to the family Ogcocephalidae of batfishes. Their distributrition includes western Atlantic, North Carolina, northern Gulf of Mexico to northern South America. They inhabit a subtropical, sandy, reef-associated, and 45–820 m deep environment.[2]

They live on the bottom, covered in sand. The fish are flat, resembling pancakes with a maximum size of ca. 10 cm.[2] They feed on small snails, clams, crustaceans, scallops, worms and occasionally on small fishes. Their eggs and larvae are pelagic and develop upon reaching the bottom.[1]

Two new species of Halieutichthys batfish were discovered in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, in the region directly affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The two species were named Halieutichthys intermedius and Halieutichthys bispinosus.[3]

References

  1. 1 2 Carpenter, K.E. (2015). Halieutichthys aculeatus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species doi:10.2305/IUCN.UK.2015-4.RLTS.T20664078A20682768.en
  2. 1 2 Froese, Rainer and Pauly, Daniel, eds. (2006). "Halieutichthys aculeatus" in FishBase. February 2006 version.
  3. "New batfish species found under Gulf oil spill". Yahoo! News. July 8, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-07-11. Retrieved 9 July 2010.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Halieutichthys aculeatus.


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/20/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.