Wreckfish
family of fishes
The wreckfish are a small group of ray-finned fish in the genus Polyprion, belonging to the monotypic family Polyprionidae in the order Acropomatiformes.
They are deep-water marine fish and can be found on the ocean bottom, where they inhabit caves and shipwrecks (thus their common name). Their scientific name is from Greek poly meaning "many" and prion meaning "saw", a reference to their prominent spiny fins.
Atlantic wreckfish (Polyprion americanus) are a long-lived commercial species in the Mediterranean, the south-eastern Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
Taxonomy
There are two species:
Polyprion americanus (Bloch & Schneider, 1801) (Atlantic wreckfish)
Polyprion oxygeneios (Schneider & Forster, 1801) (Hāpuku)
The genera Lateolabrax and Stereolepis have previously been classified in Polyprionidae, but they are currently placed in their own monogeneric families Lateolabracidae and Stereolepididae.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Wreckfish” as family of fishes. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1542731. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1801.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wreckfish” 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.