1.
Crevalle jack
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The crevalle jack, Caranx hippos is a common species of large marine fish classified within the jack family, Carangidae. It is distinguishable from similar species by its body, fin colouration. It is one of the largest fish in the genus Caranx, growing to a known length of 124 cm. The crevalle jack inhabits both inshore and offshore waters to depths of around 350 m, predominantly over reefs, bays, lagoons, dietary shifts with both age, location and season have been demonstrated, which led some researchers to postulate the species is indiscriminant in its feeding habits. The crevalle jack reaches maturity at 55 cm in males and 66 cm in females, with spawning taking place year round, the larval and juvenile growth has been extensively studied, with the oldest known individual 17 years of age. The crevalle jack is an important species to commercial fisheries throughout its range and it is taken by a variety of netting methods, including purse nets, seines and gill nets, as well as hook-and-line methods. The crevalle jack is also a revered gamefish, taken both by lures and bait, the species is considered of good to poor quality table fare, and is sold fresh, frozen, or preserved, or as fishmeal or oil at market. The crevalle jack is closely related to both the Pacific crevalle jack and the longfin crevalle jack, the latter of which has been confused with the true crevalle jack until recently. The crevalle jack is classified within the genus Caranx, one of a number of known as the jacks or trevallies. Caranx itself is part of the jack and horse mackerel family Carangidae. The species belongs to what William Smith-Vaniz and Ken Carpenter refer to as the Caranx hippos complex, the crevalle jack was the first species of its genus to be scientifically described and named, and is also the type species of the genus Caranx. It was described and named in 1766 by the famed Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, based on the specimen taken off the coast of the Carolinas. He named the species Scomber hippos, placing it in the mackerel genus Scomber, the specific epithet means horse in Latin, with Scomber hippos literally translating in English as horse mackerel, which has become a common name for many species of carangid. As the state of fish taxonomy progressed, the species was transferred to both Caranx and Carangus, with the name Caranx hippos now accepted, there has been extensive discussion in the scientific literature regarding the possible conspecifity of the Pacific crevalle jack, Caranx caninus, with Caranx hippos. Arguments ranged from the species being conspecific, subspecific or as individual species and this led to the creation of two trinomial names, Caranx hippos hippos and Caranx hippos tropicus. The former was an attempt to separate the subspecies on each side of the Americas, the species most often used common name, crevalle jack is based on the word cavalla, an earlier word used for the jacks. Other names include common jack, black-tailed trevally, couvalli jack, black cavalli, yellow cavalli and a host of generic names, such as horse mackerel and crevalle. The crevalle jack is one of the largest members of Caranx, growing to a maximum length of 125 cm
2.
Taxonomy (biology)
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Taxonomy is the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. The exact definition of taxonomy varies from source to source, but the core of the remains, the conception, naming. There is some disagreement as to whether biological nomenclature is considered a part of taxonomy, the broadest meaning of taxonomy is used here. The word taxonomy was introduced in 1813 by Candolle, in his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, the term alpha taxonomy is primarily used today to refer to the discipline of finding, describing, and naming taxa, particularly species. In earlier literature, the term had a different meaning, referring to morphological taxonomy, ideals can, it may be said, never be completely realized. They have, however, a value of acting as permanent stimulants. Some of us please ourselves by thinking we are now groping in a beta taxonomy, turrill thus explicitly excludes from alpha taxonomy various areas of study that he includes within taxonomy as a whole, such as ecology, physiology, genetics, and cytology. He further excludes phylogenetic reconstruction from alpha taxonomy, thus, Ernst Mayr in 1968 defined beta taxonomy as the classification of ranks higher than species. This activity is what the term denotes, it is also referred to as beta taxonomy. How species should be defined in a group of organisms gives rise to practical and theoretical problems that are referred to as the species problem. The scientific work of deciding how to define species has been called microtaxonomy, by extension, macrotaxonomy is the study of groups at higher taxonomic ranks, from subgenus and above only, than species. While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient civilizations, earlier works were primarily descriptive, and focused on plants that were useful in agriculture or medicine. There are a number of stages in scientific thinking. Early taxonomy was based on criteria, the so-called artificial systems. Later came systems based on a complete consideration of the characteristics of taxa, referred to as natural systems, such as those of de Jussieu, de Candolle and Bentham. The publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species led to new ways of thinking about classification based on evolutionary relationships and this was the concept of phyletic systems, from 1883 onwards. This approach was typified by those of Eichler and Engler, the advent of molecular genetics and statistical methodology allowed the creation of the modern era of phylogenetic systems based on cladistics, rather than morphology alone. Taxonomy has been called the worlds oldest profession, and naming and classifying our surroundings has likely been taking place as long as mankind has been able to communicate
3.
Animal
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Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia. The animal kingdom emerged as a clade within Apoikozoa as the group to the choanoflagellates. Animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently at some point in their lives and their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later in their lives. All animals are heterotrophs, they must ingest other organisms or their products for sustenance, most known animal phyla appeared in the fossil record as marine species during the Cambrian explosion, about 542 million years ago. Animals can be divided broadly into vertebrates and invertebrates, vertebrates have a backbone or spine, and amount to less than five percent of all described animal species. They include fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, the remaining animals are the invertebrates, which lack a backbone. These include molluscs, arthropods, annelids, nematodes, flatworms, cnidarians, ctenophores, the study of animals is called zoology. The word animal comes from the Latin animalis, meaning having breath, the biological definition of the word refers to all members of the kingdom Animalia, encompassing creatures as diverse as sponges, jellyfish, insects, and humans. Aristotle divided the world between animals and plants, and this was followed by Carl Linnaeus, in the first hierarchical classification. In Linnaeuss original scheme, the animals were one of three kingdoms, divided into the classes of Vermes, Insecta, Pisces, Amphibia, Aves, and Mammalia. Since then the last four have all been subsumed into a single phylum, in 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into two subkingdoms, Metazoa and Protozoa. The protozoa were later moved to the kingdom Protista, leaving only the metazoa, thus Metazoa is now considered a synonym of Animalia. Animals have several characteristics that set apart from other living things. Animals are eukaryotic and multicellular, which separates them from bacteria and they are heterotrophic, generally digesting food in an internal chamber, which separates them from plants and algae. They are also distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. All animals are motile, if only at life stages. In most animals, embryos pass through a stage, which is a characteristic exclusive to animals. With a few exceptions, most notably the sponges and Placozoa and these include muscles, which are able to contract and control locomotion, and nerve tissues, which send and process signals
4.
Chordate
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Chordates are deuterostomes, as during the embryo development stage the anus forms before the mouth. They are also bilaterally symmetric coelomates, in the case of vertebrate chordates, the notochord is usually replaced by a vertebral column during development, and they may have body plans organized via segmentation. There are also additional extinct taxa, the Vertebrata are sometimes considered as a subgroup of the clade Craniata, consisting of chordates with a skull, the Craniata and Tunicata compose the clade Olfactores. Of the more than 65,000 living species of chordates, the worlds largest and fastest animals, the blue whale and peregrine falcon respectively, are chordates, as are humans. Fossil chordates are known from at least as early as the Cambrian explosion, Hemichordata, which includes the acorn worms, has been presented as a fourth chordate subphylum, but it now is usually treated as a separate phylum. The Hemichordata, along with the Echinodermata, form the Ambulacraria, the Chordata and Ambulacraria form the superphylum Deuterostomia, composed of the deuterostomes. Attempts to work out the relationships of the chordates have produced several hypotheses. All of the earliest chordate fossils have found in the Early Cambrian Chengjiang fauna. Because the fossil record of early chordates is poor, only molecular phylogenetics offers a prospect of dating their emergence. However, the use of molecular phylogenetics for dating evolutionary transitions is controversial and it has also proved difficult to produce a detailed classification within the living chordates. Attempts to produce family trees shows that many of the traditional classes are paraphyletic. While this has been known since the 19th century, an insistence on only monophyletic taxa has resulted in vertebrate classification being in a state of flux. Although the name Chordata is attributed to William Bateson, it was already in prevalent use by 1880, ernst Haeckel described a taxon comprising tunicates, cephalochordates, and vertebrates in 1866. Though he used the German vernacular form, it is allowed under the ICZN code because of its subsequent latinization, among the vertebrate sub-group of chordates the notochord develops into the spine, and in wholly aquatic species this helps the animal to swim by flexing its tail. In fish and other vertebrates, this develops into the spinal cord, the pharynx is the part of the throat immediately behind the mouth. In fish, the slits are modified to form gills, a muscular tail that extends backwards behind the anus. This is a groove in the wall of the pharynx. In filter-feeding species it produces mucus to gather food particles, which helps in transporting food to the esophagus and it also stores iodine, and may be a precursor of the vertebrate thyroid gland
5.
Actinopterygii
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Actinopterygii /ˌæktᵻnˌɒptəˈrɪdʒi. aɪ/, or the ray-finned fishes, constitute a class or subclass of the bony fishes. These actinopterygian fin rays attach directly to the proximal or basal skeletal elements, the radials, numerically, actinopterygians are the dominant class of vertebrates, comprising nearly 99% of the over 30,000 species of fish. They are ubiquitous throughout freshwater and marine environments from the sea to the highest mountain streams. Extant species can range in size from Paedocypris, at 8 mm, to the ocean sunfish, at 2,300 kg. Ray-finned fishes occur in variant forms. The main features of a typical ray-finned fish are shown in the diagram at the left. In nearly all ray-finned fish, the sexes are separate, development then proceeds with a free-swimming larval stage. However other patterns of ontogeny exist, with one of the commonest being sequential hermaphroditism, in most cases this involves protogyny, fish starting life as females and converting to males at some stage, triggered by some internal or external factor. This may be advantageous as females become less prolific as they age while male fecundity increases with age, protandry, where a fish converts from male to female, is much less common than protogyny. Most families use external rather than internal fertilization, of the oviparous teleosts, most do not provide parental care. Viviparity is relatively rare and is found in about 6% of teleost species, male territoriality preadapts a species for evolving male parental care. There are a few examples of fish that self-fertilise, the mangrove rivulus is an amphibious, simultaneous hermaphrodite, producing both eggs and spawn and having internal fertilisation. This mode of reproduction may be related to the habit of spending long periods out of water in the mangrove forests it inhabits. Males are occasionally produced at temperatures below 19 °C and can fertilise eggs that are spawned by the female. This maintains genetic variability in a species that is otherwise highly inbred, the earliest known fossil actinopterygiian is Andreolepis hedei, dating back 420 million years. Remains have been found in Russia, Sweden, and Estonia, actinopterygians are divided into the subclasses Chondrostei and Neopterygii. The Neopterygii, in turn, are divided into the infraclasses Holostei and Teleostei, during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic the teleosts in particular diversified widely, and as a result, 96% of all known fish species are teleosts. The cladogram shows the groups of actinopterygians and their relationship to the terrestrial vertebrates that evolved from a related group of fish
6.
Perciformes
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Perciformes, also called the Percomorpha or Acanthopteri, are the largest order of vertebrates, containing about 41% of all bony fish. They belong to the class of ray-finned fish, and comprise over 10,000 species found in almost all aquatic ecosystems, the order contains about 160 families, which is the most of any order within the vertebrates. It is also the most variably sized order of vertebrates, ranging from the 7-mm Schindleria brevipinguis to the marlin in the Makaira genus and they first appeared and diversified in the Late Cretaceous. Among the well-known members of group are cichlids, California sheephead, bluegill, damselfish, snappers, bass. The dorsal and anal fins are divided into anterior spiny and posterior soft-rayed portions, the pelvic fins usually have one spine and up to five soft rays, positioned unusually far forward under the chin or under the belly. Scales are usually ctenoid, although sometimes they are cycloid or otherwise modified, as traditionally defined before the introduction of cladistics, the Perciformes are almost certainly paraphyletic. Other orders that should possibly be included as suborders are the Scorpaeniformes, Tetraodontiformes, of the presently recognized suborders, several may be paraphyletic, as well. These are grouped by suborder/superfamily, generally following the text Fishes of the World
7.
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz, as he is known in Europe, was a nineteenth-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a man in the United States, ultimately settling in Ohio in 1815, where he made notable contributions to botany, zoology. He also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics, in addition to work he had completed in Europe. Rafinesque was eccentric, and is portrayed as an erratic genius. He was an autodidact who excelled in fields of knowledge, as a zoologist, botanist, writer. He wrote prolifically on such topics as anthropology, biology, geology, and linguistics. Today, scholars agree that he was far ahead of his time in many areas, among his theories was that ancestors of Native Americans had migrated by the Bering Sea from Asia to North America. Rafinesque was born on October 22,1783 in Galata, a suburb of Constantinople and his father F. G. Rafinesque was a French merchant from Marseilles, his mother M. Schmaltz was of German descent and born in Constantinople. His father died in Philadelphia about 1793, Rafinesque spent his youth in Marseilles, and was mostly self-educated, he never attended university. By the age of twelve, he had begun collecting plants for a herbarium, by fourteen, he taught himself perfect Greek and Latin because he needed to follow footnotes in the books he was reading in his paternal grandmothers libraries. In 1802, at the age of nineteen, Rafinesque sailed to Philadelphia in the United States with his younger brother and they traveled through Pennsylvania and Delaware, where he made the acquaintance of most of the young nations few botanists. In 1805 Rafinesque returned to Europe with his collection of specimens, and settled in Palermo, Sicily. He became so successful in trade that he retired by age twenty-five, for a time Rafinesque also worked as secretary to the American consul. During his stay in Sicily, he studied plants and fishes and he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1808. After their son died in 1815, he left her and returned to the United States, when his ship Union foundered near the coast of Connecticut, he lost all his books and all his specimens. Settling in New York, Rafinesque became a member of the newly established Lyceum of Natural History. In 1817 his book Florula Ludoviciana or A Flora of the State of Louisiana was strongly criticized by fellow botanists, by 1818, he had collected and named more than 250 new species of plants and animals. Slowly he was rebuilding his collection of objects from nature, in 1819 Rafinesque became professor of botany at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he also gave private lessons in French, Italian and Spanish
8.
Alectis
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Alectis is a genus of fish in the family Carangidae containing three extant species, all of which are large marine fishes. They are commonly known as threadfish, diamond trevallies and occasionally pompanos, Alectis is one of 33 genera in the jack and horse mackerel family Carangidae. The Carangidae are perciform fishes in the suborder Percoidei, the first fish in the genus to be described was Alectis ciliaris under the genus name of Zeus, part of the dory family. Lacépède recognized the species was not a dory and assigned it to a new genus, Gallus, in 1815, Rafinesque proposed the name Alectis, into which three species were eventually placed. Georges Cuvier proposed a name, Scyris for the genus in 1829. The name Alectis is derived from one of three Erinyes in the Greek mythology, daughter of Acheronte with a terrible rage, a single species has been identified the fossil record, Alectis simus, from the Eocene period of England. It was found alongside a number of extinct and extant carangid genera including Caranx and Usacaranx and they are generally a silver colour, with pale green to hyaline fins. A. indica is the largest of the genus, growing to a reported 165 m and 25 kg in weight, the genus has a circum-tropical distribution, with adults generally restricted to reefs in coastal areas down to 100 m, while juveniles are often pelagic. All three are predators of small fishes, cephalopods and crustaceans, a little is known of their reproductive habits and larval phases, with spawning occurring during daylight between pairs. The genus is of importance to both commercial and subsistence fisheries, with the species generally not numerous enough to warrant a specific fishery. All species are considered game fish, attaining large sizes. The flesh of the genus is considered very good for culinary purposes. In Singapore, A. indica has successfully bred in aquaculture for food production in relatively low numbers. Juveniles are occasionally used in aquariums, noted for their filamentous anal and dorsal fins
9.
Alepes
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Alepes is a genus containing five extant species of tropical marine fishes in the jack family, Carangidae. They are commonly known as scads, a term applied to many genera of carangid fishes. Their body form, however, differs from these other scads by being much more ovate in shape, more similar to the larger jacks taken as game fish and they are found in coastal waters throughout the Indo-West Pacific region. Alepes is a genus containing five extant and one extinct species and it is part of the jack family, Carangidae, a group of perciform fish in the suborder Percoidei. Recent phylogenetic studies using molecular information have placed Alepes in the subfamily Caranginae, trachinus was invalid, however, as it was already in use for a genus of weevers. This makes A. melanoptera the type species of the genus, the other species currently placed in Alepes were not directly classified in the genus, but were transferred from other, often distantly related genera. Many of these species have numerous junior synonyms, Alepes comes from the Greek word alepis, without scales. A single species has been identified from the record, Alepes pin. This area was part of the Indian Ocean which extended well into Europe at the time. The other species are more often encountered at sizes below 20 centimetres. They have strongly compressed ovate to oblong shaped bodies, with fin arrangements much like the rest of the Carangidae and they have two dorsal fins, the first consisting of weak spines and the second of a single spine followed by a number of soft rays. The anal fin has two detached spines anterior to the section which consists of one spine and a number of soft rays. Their lateral lines have a moderate to strong anterior curve, with scutes present on the section of the lateral line. They are all a blue-green-grey above, fading to white below. Only one, A. kleinni has bands or markings, the fish in Alepes are all predators, taking a range of crustaceans including copepods, decapods, prawns and shrimp, as well as small fish. At least one species shows a change in feeding intensity over the period of a year, the reproduction of most species is unstudied, except for A. kleinii. This species spawns on an event over a period of a few months, releasing small transparent. Natural spawning behavior in the genus is unknown, the members of Alepes are all distributed in the tropical to subtropical regions of the Indo-West Pacific region
10.
Cleftbelly trevally
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The cleftbelly trevally is a species of tropical marine fish of the jack family, Carangidae. The species inhabits coastal waters throughout the Indo-West Pacific region from South Africa in the west to Japan in the east and it is not a large fish, growing to a maximum recorded length of 26.5 cm. Cleftbelly trevally are fish, taking a variety of small crustaceans. The species is of importance to fisheries throughout its range. The cleftbelly trevally is the species in the genus Atropus. The carangids are Perciform fishes in the suborder Percoidei, bloch and Schneider placed the species in the genus Brama, within the pomfret family. The generic position of the species was revised twice, once being placed in the genus, Caranx. The genus Atropus had been created by Georges Cuvier in 1817 as Les Atropus. A. atropos is the species of the genus by monotypy. The type specimen was taken from the waters of Puducherry, in India, the fact that the generic and specific names differ by a single letter has also led to the misspelling of the species as Atropus atropus in some publications. The species is most commonly referred to in English as the trevally, with other names including cleftbelly kingfish, Kuweh trevally. It is also called the blackfin jack, but should not be confused with Hemicaranx zelotes. The cleftbelly trevally has a shape similar in many ways to a number of the larger jacks. The dorsal profile of the head is straight and steep from the tip of the jaw to above the eye where the profile becomes convex. The eye lacks an adipose eyelid, and the jaw has a narrow band of small teeth. The entire chest from underneath the pectoral fins to the base of the fins is scaleless. There are two dorsal fins, the first with eight spines and the second with a single spine followed by 19 to 22 soft rays. The anal fin has two detached spines before the part of the anal fin, which consists of one spine and 17 or 18 soft rays
