United Colors of Avalon: Cabrillo Mole 1/24/21

[EgoNonBaptizo]

Ken, you mentioned that California sheephead is now Bodianus pulcher as opposed to Semicossyphus pulcher, but I am struggling to find this in scientific literature. All I am finding is a paper by Poortvliet et al., 2013, that mentions that the three species of sheephead form a sister clade to the rest of Bodianus.

 

[Ken Jones]

I currently use "Miller and Lea's Guide To The Coastal Marine Fishes Of California, Second Edition, Revised by Milton Love and Julianne Kalman Passarelli" (published 2020) as my go to guide. I think it's the most up to date and most thorough book on what's going on. I haven't asked Milton about the change but the authors write in the book: "We follow Baliga and Law (2016) and Santini et al. (2016) and remove this species from the genus Semicossyphus."

I think their book is the definitive book at this time although many people like "A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes" by Kells, Rocha and Allen due to their color illustrations (which is a plus even though colors can vary).

It's great to have both books!

 

[EgoNonBaptizo]

Thanks for the reply. I just looked at those publications, and I personally am not super sure about the lump, since as is Bodianus (like many fish genera) appears to be pretty severely overlumped and could stand to be split into multiple genera. I'm not sure about the legality of posting figures from an otherwise paywalled publication, but Semicossyphus is nested in Bodianus while, depending on how the phylogeny is rotated, could still be put in a derived position (i.e. farthest from the base of the Bodianus genetic tree).

I should try to get my hands on those books sometime soon.