Occurrence of the flagfin mojarra, Eucinostomus melanopterus (Bleeker, 1863) (Perciformes: Gerreidae), near Mar del Plata city (Argentina): southernmost occurrence on the western Atlantic coast

Abstract

The Gerreidae family is represented by predominantly estuarine medium to small size coastal fish found over sand or mud bottoms (Gilmore and Greenfield, 2002). Some species occur in marine environments and some in freshwater; juvenile members of several species of the family are abundant in estuarine lagoons, which are ideal environments for breeding (Menezes and Figueiredo, 1980). This family includes about 44 species (Nelson, 2006), one of which, Eucinostomus melanopterus (Bleeker, 1863), is distributed in the Eastern Atlantic from Senegal to Angola (Gilmore and Greenfield, 2002) and in the Western Atlantic from Chesapeake Bay (Murdy et al., 1997), New Jersey (Gilmore and Greenfield, 2002), Bermuda (McEachran and Fechhelm, 2005), and Florida to Río Grande do Sul (Brazil) (Carvalho Filho, 1999). This species was reported in Argentine waters south of Río de la Plata in April 2008 (Solari et al., 2010); the present report extends the distribution of the species an additional 204 km south of this previous Argentinean record.