Neosebastidae, the gurnard scorpionfishes or gurnard perches, is a small family of deep-sea

ray-finned fish Actinopterygii (; ), members of which are known as ray-finned fish or actinopterygians, is a class of bony fish that comprise over 50% of living vertebrate species. They are so called because of their lightly built fins made of webbings of sk ...

es. It is part of the suborder

Scorpaenoidei Scorpaenoidei is a suborder of Actinopterygii, ray-finned fishes, part of the Order (biology), order Perciformes, that includes the scorpionfishes, lionfishes and velvetfishes. This suborder is at its most diverse in the Pacific and Indian Oceans ...

within the order

Perciformes Perciformes (), also called the Acanthopteri, is an order or superorder of ray-finned fish in the clade Percomorpha. ''Perciformes'' means " perch-like". Among the well-known members of this group are perches and darters ( Percidae), and als ...

. These fishes are found in the Indian and

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 the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the cont ...

oceans. Several of the species in this family are venomous.

Taxonomy

Neosebastinae, or the family Neosebastidae, was first described as a taxon by the Japanese ichthyologist

Kiyomatsu Matsubara was a Japanese people, Japanese marine biologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. Born Kiyomatsu Sakamoto in Hyogo Prefecture, Kiyomatsu Matsubara was the first professor of the Department of Fisheries of the University of Kyoto and is consider ...

in 1943. The grouping is treated as a subfamily of the Scorpaenidae within the order

Scorpaeniformes The Scorpaeniformes are a diverse Order (biology), order of Actinopterygii, ray-finned fish, including the lionfishes and sculpins, but have also been called the Scleroparei. It is one of the five largest orders of bony fishes by number of spec ...

by the 5th Edition of ''

Fishes of the World ''Fishes of the World'' is a standard reference for the systematics of fishes. It was first written in 1976 by the American ichthyologist Joseph S. Nelson (1937–2011). Now in its fifth edition (2016), the work is a comprehensive overview of t ...

''. However, other authorities, such as

FishBase FishBase is a global species database of fish species (specifically finfish). It is the largest and most extensively accessed online database on adult finfish on the web.

, regard the taxon as a family within the suborder

, part of the

. The family name is derived from the genus name ''Neosebastes'' which is a compound of ''neo'' meaning "new" and ''Sebastes'', as, when he coined the name, Alphonse Guichenot thought that the new genus was closely related to or was a subgenus of the genus '' Sebastes''.

Genera

There are two genera which are classified in Neosebastidae: * '' Maxillicosta'' Whitley, 1935 * '' Neosebastes'' Guichenot, 1867

Characteristics

Neosebastidae, the gurnard perches, have a prominent head with large eyes and a large mouth. There are strong bony ridges and spines on the head and cheeks. Much of the body and head are covered in rough ctenoid scales. They have 13 long and robust venom bearing spines in the dorsal fin and 6-8 soft rays. They vary in size from a maximum

total length Fish measurement is the measuring of individual fish and various parts of their anatomies, for data used in many areas of ichthyology, including taxonomy and fishery biology. Overall length Standard length (SL) is the length of a fish measured f ...

of in the bighead gurnard perch (''Neosebastes pandus'') down to a maximum total length of in Whitley's gurnard perch (''Maxillicosta whitleyi'').

Distribution, habitat and biology

Neosebastidae are found in the eastern Indian Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean where they have an antiequatorial distribution in temperate and subtropical waters either side of the equator. They are benthic fishes living on soft substrates and feed on small fishes and crustaceans. They are oviparous, and, in at least ''N. pandus'' the females are larger than the males and the larger females have higher fecundity,

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q150746 Perciformes families