Abstract
First record of the northern brown shrimp Penaeus aztecus Ives, 1891 (Crustacea, Decapoda, Penaeidae) from Libyan waters
Highlights
Within the Mediterranean, the northern brown shrimp, Penaeus aztecus Ives, 1891, can be best described as a “sprinter” of an introduced species, given its pattern of prodigious expansion within the Mediterranean in the last decade
The thirteen P. aztecus specimens have been retained in an ethanol solution in a private collection by one of us (AA) and have, to date, not been catalogued
It is to be remarked that, upon being interviewed, the fishers making the catch explained that they had started observing P. aztecus within the lagoon approximately seven years ago, but had never to date reported this finding to scientists
Summary
Within the Mediterranean, the northern brown shrimp, Penaeus aztecus Ives, 1891, can be best described as a “sprinter” of an introduced species, given its pattern of prodigious expansion within the Mediterranean in the last decade. The species is native to the Western Atlantic coastline of the USA and Mexico, with its range extending from Massachusetts to the Yucatan (Cook and Lindner 1970) It has exhibited a very rapid range expansion within the Mediterranean since its first record from the basin in 2009 in the Bay of Antalya, Turkey as Farfantepenaeus aztecus (Deval et al 2010). Following this progressive spread to contiguous coastal areas P. aztecus was recorded in disparate coastal regions in the Mediterranean, including the Gulf of Lions in France (Galil et al 2017) and the southern coastal waters of the basin, from Egypt, including the Nile Delta in 2018, the coastal waters of Alexandria in 2019–2020 (Özcan et al 2019; El-Deeb et al 2020), and the Gulf of Gabes, Tunisia (Ben Jarray et al 2019).
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