Drepane (fish)
genus of fishes
Drepane is a genus of marine and brackish water ray-finned fishes, known commonly as the sicklefishes. It is the only genus in the monotypic percomorph family Drepaneidae. These fish occur in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, and in the eastern Atlantic near Africa.
Taxonomy
Drepane was first proposed as a genus in 1831 by the French zoologist Georges Cuvier. In 1917 David Starr Jordan designated Chaetodon punctatus, which had been described by Linnaeus in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae published in 1758 with its type locality given as Asia, as its type species. In 1872 Theodore Gill classified the genus within the family Drepaneidae and it is the only genus classified within that family. The 5th edition of Fishes of the World classifies the Drepaneidae within the order Moroniformes alongside the Moronidae and Ephippidae. However, other authorities have found that the Moronidae is not closely related to the other two families and classify the Drepaneidae and the Ephippidae in the order Ephippiformes. Other authorities classify all three families in the Moroniformes sensu Fishes of the World in the Acanthuriformes.
Etymology
Drepane means "sickle" and this refers to the sickle-shaped pectoral fins.
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This entry incorporates text from “Drepane (fish)” 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.