Review of Atlantic and Eastern Pacific Anthiine fishes (Teleostei: Perciformes: Serranidae), with descriptions of two new genera
William D. Anderson, Jr. and Phillip C. Heemstra
Philadelphia, PA: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2012, Volume 102, Part 2, 173 pp., ISBN: 978-1-60618-022-8, US$35.00 (paperback)
This book provides a detailed revision of the anthiine fishes from the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific Oceans. There have been numerous descriptions of anthiine fishes in recent years together with some different opinions on their classification being published. This revision provides critical information on the classification, identification, description and distribution of the anthiine fishes of the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific and will be an extremely important contribution to the taxonomy of this group of fishes. It also describes two new genera of anthiine fishes from these regions and provides important information on how to discriminate the many genera and species in this subfamily.
The Introduction provides a concise summary of the information known to date, as well as providing a good objective summary of the differing opinions on the classification of the family Serranidae over the last decade. The authors make an excellent point that the use of ichthyocides, particularly when SCUBA diving, has contributed greatly to the knowledge of this group, highlighted by the fact that more than half of the world's anthiine fishes have been described since 1971. The other preliminary sections provide detailed methodology information, as well as excellent introductory information on various characters such as otoliths, sexuality and feeding habits, which provide the reader with the necessary insights into the generic and species accounts. The colour plates are also found in this section. The first two excellent figures show two of the important taxonomic characters for this group, i.e. ctenoid scale configuration and supraneural bones. The remaining figures are of the anthiine fishes treated in this book. These images are generally of excellent quality and for the few which are not, they are obviously the best available at this time and still show the reader what is available. I would have preferred to see the image section come after the preliminary sections and before the key to genera, as they sometimes break up a paragraph, even mid-sentence. At first I could not follow the reasoning for the order of species in the figures, but after working through the generic key I understood the reason for this and agree it is a good way for them to be organized. However, having the image section at the end of the guide would overcome that possible confusion.
The book then leads into a key to the genera of Atlantic and Eastern Pacific anthiine fishes, which I found was very good and easy to follow. I find keys often have one or more weak sections that force users to check various options, but this key and the key to species were very easy to follow. I would have liked to see page numbers in brackets after each of the genera so the reader can easily go to that generic account. In the species keys, I am not the biggest fan of geographic distribution used as a key step (e.g. page 13, section 1) as it assumes the location is known and that there is no chance the species could not be in both areas. However, I can see that in almost all cases this is a very easy and a logical first step.
The generic and species treatments are very detailed, but concise and not too verbose. Having worked on anthiine fishes previously, I found the treatments were presented in a very logical and easy to follow order. The incorporation of information on feeding habits and sexuality was particularly interesting and also makes this book a useful resource for many fish ecological studies. The descriptions of two new genera, Chloranthias and Baldwinella, were detailed and fully justified by the authors. In the key to genera on pages 11 and 12, it would have been good to have ‘new genus’ or ‘n.g.’ after these two genera to clearly indicate to the reader that these were the new genera. It was not easy to follow why no generic or species accounts were provided for Acanthistius by the authors and given that it was the only genus without an account, this should have been included.
The tables at the end of the book provide excellent summary information for each of the genera (Table 1) and frequency distributions for important characters, e.g. number of dorsal-fin soft rays and number of gill rakers (Tables 2–7). These tables will be very useful to readers and an important resource for future taxonomists working on any species of anthiine fishes from these regions. The maps are easy to follow and clearly show where the specimens of each of the species were collected. However, it would have been useful to have the page number in brackets after each of the species for those readers looking at the maps to work out which species occur in a particular area.
This book is the most up-to-date publication on anthiine fishes from any region of the world. It provides a detailed revision of the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific fishes, including a description of two new genera, which was needed for this group given the number of recently described species and changes in generic placements. Detailed revisions such as these are extremely important resources for other ichthyologists, but they seem to be less common in recent years. This is probably due to fewer resources being available for taxonomy in recent years and this impedes such detailed taxonomic studies. It would be a benefit to see this revision expanded into other regions of the world by these authors.
William T. White
Ichthyologist
CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research
Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
E-mail: [email protected]
© 2013, William T. White