Hexagrammidae
family of fishes
Hexagrammidae, the greenlings, is a family of marine ray-finned fishes belonging to the suborder Cottoidei in the order Perciformes. These fishes are found in the North Pacific Ocean.
Taxonomy
Hexagrammidae was first proposed as a family in 1888 by the American ichthyologist David Starr Jordan. The 5th edition of Fishes of the World classifies this family as the only family in the monotypic superfamily Hexagrammoidea within the suborder Cottoidei of the diverse order Scorpaeniformes. Other workers have found that if the Scorpaeniformes, as delimited in Fishes of the World, is not included in the Perciformes it renders the Perciformes paraphyletic. These workers retain the Cottoidei as a suborder within the Perciformes while reclassifying Hexagrammoidea as the infraorder Hexagrammales. The family Zaniolepididae has been included within the Hexagrammidae, as the subfamilies Zaniolepidinae and Oxylebiinae, but Fishes of the World and Betancur et al classify these taxa as distinct from the Hexagrammidae. Placing these two families in their own monotypic superfamilies was originally proposed in 1994 by Gento Shinohara.
Subfamilies and genera
Hexagrammidae contains the following subfamilies and genera:
Subfamily Ophiodontinae Jordan & Gilbert, 1883 (lingcods)
Genus Ophiodon Girard, 1854
Subfamily Oxylebiinae Gill, 1862 (painted greenlings)
Genus Oxylebius Gill, 1862
Subfamily Hexagramminae Jordan, 1888 (greenlings)
Genus Hexagrammos Tilesius, 1810
Subfamily Pleurogramminae Rutenberg, 1954 (Atka mackerels)
Genus Pleurogrammus Gill, 1861
The following fossil genera are also known:
Genus †Achrestogrammus Jordan, 1921 (Late Miocene of California, US)
Genus †Paraophiodon Nazarkin, 1997 (mid-late Miocene of Sakhalin, Russia)
Genus †Sakhalinia Nazarkin, Carnevale & Bannikov, 2013 (mid-Miocene of Sakhalin, Russia)
Characteristics
Hexagrammidae have cirri but do not have ridges or spines on their heads, They have between one and five lateral lines and may have cycloid or ctenoid scales. There is a single dorsal fin which is notched and contains between 16 and 28 spines and 11 and 30 soft rays.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hexagrammidae” 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.