Groupers of the world: A field and market guide

Groupers of the world: A field and market guide

Mathew T. Craig, Yvonne J. S. de Mitcheson and Phillip C. Heemstra

NISC (Pty) Ltd, Grahamstown, 2011, 356 pp., ISBN 978-1-920033-11-8. £49.99 (hardback)

Groupers in general and members of the genus Epinephelus are always considered an excellent commercial target for human consumption globally. To a lesser extent, these fish species are also used for the marine ornamental trade. In addition to the fisheries activities around the world and the unusual biology of this group of fishes which often show hermaphroditism, longevity and aggregation-spawning, the two above-mentioned factors made groupers susceptible to overexploitation. Therefore, urgent steps are needed towards conservation and fishery management by improving public awareness, understanding the vulnerability of their populations, and to protect the habitats upon which they depend.

Ichthyologists and marine biologists in general will be the expected users of this first edition of the ‘Groupers of the World’, but the whole content of the book will appeal to fish taxonomists in particular. The book is very attractive and the strength of this guide lies in its detailed drawings, high-quality colour photographs, taxonomic keys and other biological data. I personally communicated with the third author during the identification of some fish species collected from the Arabian Sea coasts of Oman; he is a world-reknowned enthusiastic scientist. In addition, the foreword by the well-known systematic ichthyologist, Dr John Randall, raises the content of this book to a superior and highly scientific standard.

The arrangement of the book is well suited to both laboratory and field work, especially as it comprises over 150 species from the 16 genera of groupers with over 350 colour photographs, and in this respect I would suggest a water-proof paper for the next edition to further enhance interest in this guide. The choice of the authors to include biological data, distribution and ecological habitat information on each species is particularly important in order to facilitate a first-look identification process and to be familiar with the species. In my view, the authors have set a new standard for fish classification and the arrangement is quite clever from the point of view of presenting outstanding photographs of live specimens and in sorting the species information from an economic point of view. As a result, it does not overwhelm the reader with huge amounts of information at this stage of fish identification, which is particularly useful if the reader is not a taxonomist or even an ichthyologist.

The contents of this guide fall into four main sections: introduction, outline to the guide, species accounts and appendix. The introduction is well-thought-out and of a reasonable length suitable for a field guide. In the introduction, the authors give concise, concentrated and basic information about the biology, ecology, distribution and the status of fisheries of groupers in general. The authors also included in the introduction brief details of the systematics of groupers and their recent taxonomy. In the outline section, the authors describe how to use the book, together with IUCN (http://www.iucn.org) criteria used for assessment of conservation status, which in my opinion is an important piece of information. At the end of this section follows a short, illustrated glossary of terms in which the authors define the most popular ichthyological and anatomical terms that the readers might not be familiar with.

The species accounts section features each grouper species assembled by genus group, all in alphabetical order. At the beginning of each genus section, a short overview of the species belonging to that genus is given. In addition to the scientific name of each species, the common name is also given in English, French and Spanish. The number of the black and white images varies between 1 and 2 and the colour images between 2 and 4 according to variability of the colour of each species.

It is interesting enough to see that Epinephelus is clearly the most diverse genus dealt with in this guide. It contains 83 species, followed by Cephalopholis with 23 species. There are 7 monospecific genera, 2 genera with 2 and 3 species, and 3 genera with 7, 15 and 16 species. As a fish taxonomist working in one of the areas where groupers mentioned in this book are distributed, I found this book most helpful in the process of fish identification and would like to compare the number of species included in this guide with what is known today in the waters of the Sultanate of Oman. For instance, Randall (1995) reported 39 species of groupers from Omani waters. Out of 157 species described in the guide, there are 41 species indicated to occur in Omani waters (=26.1% of the total number of species dealt with). In a new edition the recently reported range extensions of the moustache grouper Epinephelus chabaudi (Castelnau, 1861) and the dotted grouper E. epistictus (Temminck & Schlegel, 1842) to the Arabian Sea coasts of Oman and the marine waters of Iraq at the northwest corner of the Arabian Gulf (Al-Mukhtar et al. 2011) would also deserve consideration.

The way that the book has been written does not permit the citation of references, so a separate bibliography section that contains useful references to anyone working in the field is presented in the appendix at the end of the book. The authors acknowledge the help and support provided in various ways by ichthyologists and fish taxonomists from countries around the world.

This guide is a very colourful and attractive publication that offers a consistent treatment of groupers occurring in habitats around the world. It is a very useful book that should be of great help to those interested in marine fish species, from amateurs to professionals enjoying the fascination of groupers’ diversity. The layout and quality of the publication live up to the high standard we have come to expect from the publisher and at £49.99 readers will find the book to be excellent value for money.

Laith A. Jawad

Fish Biodiversity Expert and Consultant,

Marine Science and Fisheries Centre,

Ministry of Fisheries Wealth, Sultanate of Oman

E-mail: [email protected]

© 2012 Laith A. Jawad