Gymnocanthus pistilliger
species of fish
Gymnocanthus pistilliger, the threaded sculpin, is a species of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Cottidae, the typical sculpins. This species occurs in the northern Pacific Ocean.
Taxonomy
Gymnocanthus pistilliger was first formally described as Cottus pistilliger in 1815 by the German zoologist Peter Simon Pallas with the type locality given as Unalaska Island and Port Avatsch. In 1829 the French zoologist Georges Cuvier described a new species, Cottus ventralis, from Kamchatka and in 1839 the English zoologist William Swainson classified this taxon within the monospecific genus Gymnocanthus. Cuvier's C. ventralis has since been regarded as a synonym of Pallas's C. pistilliger. The specific name pistilliger means "to bear pistils", a reference to the axillary papillae of the males.
Description
Gymnocanthus pistilliger has dorsal fins supported by between 9 and 11 spines and between 13 and 16 soft rays while the anal fin has 14 to 18 soft rays. There are a small number of bony plates typically found along the median line of the space between the eyes. There is no cirrhus above the eye in adults. There are three pairs of bony tubercles on the back of the head.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2308670. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1815, 1829 and 1839.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gymnocanthus pistilliger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.