Pancake batfish

Pancake batfish
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Lophiiformes
Family: Ogcocephalidae
Genus: Halieutichthys
Species: H. aculeatus
Binomial name
Halieutichthys aculeatus
(Mitchill, 1818)

The pancake batfish, Halieutichthys aculeatus, belongs to the family Ogcocephalidae of batfishes. Their distributrition includes western Atlantic, North Carolina, northern Gulf of Mexico to northern South America. They inhabit a subtropical, sandy, reef-associated, and 45–820 m deep environment.[1]

They live on the bottom, covered in sand. The fish are flat, resembling pancakes.

Two new species of Halieutichthys batfish were discovered in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, in the region directly affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The two species were named Halieutichthys intermedius and Halieutichthys bispinosus.[2]


References

  1. ^ Froese, Rainer, and Daniel Pauly, eds. (2006). "Halieutichthys aculeatus" in FishBase. February 2006 version.
  2. ^ Reuters, Yahoo! (July 8, 2010). "New batfish species found under Gulf oil spill". Yahoo! News. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100708/sc_nm/us_oil_spill_fish. Retrieved 9 July 2010.