Abstract
The spotted scat Scatophagus argus (Linnaeus, 1766) is recorded for the first time from Malta and the Mediterranean from fish offered for sale at a Maltese fish market. Interviews with fish sellers and fishermen showed that this fish is caught occasionally in small numbers in trammel nets from shallows on seagrass meadows in the southeast of Malta and that it has been present since at least 2007. The native range of the species is the Indian Ocean and the tropical to warm temperate Pacific but the species is commercially available as a brackish water aquarium fish. Given that this species has also been regularly imported into Malta by the aquarium trade since at least 1986, an escape or deliberate release by an aquarist seem to be the most probably mode of introduction. It is surprising that this euryhaline species which requires brackish water to complete its life cycle should have become established in Malta where there is a dearth of such habitats.
Highlights
The number of non-indigenous fishes recorded from the Mediterranean shows an increasing trend with time and the tally is presently some 149 species (Zenetos et al 2010)
The picture that has emerged is that most species have entered autochthonously from the Red Sea via the Suez Canal and from the NE Atlantic via the Strait of Gibraltar, and that once inside the Mediterranean, some have expanded their range, driven by a warming trend of the Mediterranean surface waters, in some cases assisted by human-mediated dispersal (Galil 2008, 2009; Ben Rais Lasram and Mouillot 2009; Occhipinti-Ambrogi and Galil 2010; Zenetos et al 2010)
Omobranchus punctatus (Valenciennes, 1836) is an IndoPacific blenny that does not occur in the Red Sea but a single specimen was recorded from the port of Ashdod, Israel in 2003 (Golani 2004); it is possible that this species reached the Suez Canal through ship-mediated transport (Bath 1980) and thence the Mediterranean
Summary
The number of non-indigenous fishes recorded from the Mediterranean shows an increasing trend with time and the tally is presently some 149 species (Zenetos et al 2010). The circumtropical Bregmaceros atlanticus Goode and Bean, 1886 was first recorded as a single specimen from the Strait of Sicily in 1965, in 2004 and 2006 from off the coasts of Turkey and Israel in numbers; Goren and Galil (2006) speculate that, given its wide distribution, B. atlanticus may occur as yet undiscovered populations in the Red Sea from where it entered the Mediterranean, or else it may have been introduced with ballast water.
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