''Echeneis'' is a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial n ...

of fish in the family

Echeneidae The remora (), sometimes called suckerfish, is any of a family (Echeneidae) of ray-finned fish in the order Carangiformes. Depending on species, they grow to long. Their distinctive first dorsal fins take the form of a modified oval, sucker-li ...

, the remoras. The genus is distributed in the

Atlantic The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the "Old World" of Africa, Europe an ...

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

and

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by ...

s. The generic name ''Echeneis'' comes from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

''echein'' meaning "to hold" and ''naus'' meaning "ship", a reference to the ability of these fish to attach themselves to the hulls of vessels and, in legend, to slow them down.

Species

The currently recognized species in this genus are: * '' Echeneis naucrates''

Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, t ...

, 1758 – live sharksucker * ''

Echeneis neucratoides The whitefin sharksucker (''Echeneis neucratoides'') or short-disk sharksucker, is a species of remora native to subtropical waters of the western Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. This fish can reach a length of TL though mos ...

'' Zuiew, 1789 – whitefin sharksucker

Fossil species

* †''

Echeneis urupensis An echeneis is a legendary creature; a small fish that was said to latch on to ships, holding them back. Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) also said of the echeneis: "It has a disgraceful repute, as being employed in love philtres, and for the pu ...

'' Daniltshenko, 1958 (

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recent" ...

of Russia)P. G. Daniltshenko. 1960
Bony fishes of the Maikop deposits of the Caucasus
Trudy Paleontologicheskogo Instituta 78: pp. 171-172.

References

External links

*
''Echeneis''
at Zipcodezoo.com Marine fish genera Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus {{Carangiformes-stub