Prowfish
species of fish
The prowfish (Zaprora silenus) is a species of scorpaeniform marine fish found in the northern Pacific Ocean. It is the only extant member of the family, Zaproridae.
Fossil record
There are 2 extinct species only known with fossil records, †Zaprora koreana Nam & Nazarkin, 2018 from the Middle Miocene Duho Formation in Pohang, South Korea. Another genus, †Araeosteus rothi Jordan & Gilbert, 1920, is known from the Monterey Formation and the Modelo Formation in Southern California.
Distribution
Prowfish range from the Aleutian Islands, Alaska west to Kamchatka, Russia; from Navarin Canyon in the Bering Sea south to Hokkaidō, Japan and Monterey, California. An otherwise little-known species, prowfish are important to subsistence fisheries in remote regions.
Description
Growing to a length of 88 cm (35 in), prowfish have stout, laterally compressed and elongated bodies. They have single, somewhat high dorsal fin running nearly the entire length of the back; it may contain 54–58 pliable spines. The anal fin is also fairly extensive. The tail fin is large, rounded and truncated; the pectoral fins are enlarged and pelvic fins are conspicuously absent.
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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 Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q135033. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prowfish” 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.