Malabar trevally
| Malabar trevally | |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Actinopterygii |
| Order: | Perciformes |
| Family: | Carangidae |
| Genus: | Carangoides |
| Species: | C. malabaricus |
| Binomial name | |
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Carangoides malabaricus (Bloch & Schneider, 1801) |
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| Range of the Malabar trevally | |
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The Malabar trevally, Carangoides malabaricus, (also known as the Malabar jack, Malabar kingfish and nakedshield kingfish) is a species of large marine fish of the jack family, Carangidae. It is distributed throughout the Indian and west Pacific Oceans from South Africa in the west to Japan and Australia in the east, inhabiting reefs and sandy bays on the continental shelf. The Malabar trevally is similar to many of the other species in the genus Carangoides, with the number of gill rakers and the grey-brown colour of the tongue being the diagnostic features. The Malabar trevally is a predator, taking a variety of small fish, cephalopods and crustaceans. The species is of minor economic importance throughout its range, caught by a variety of net and handline methods.
The Malabar trevally is one of 21 species in the genus Carangoides, itself one of 30 genera in the jack family Carangidae. The carangids are perciform fish in the suborder Percoidei.
The Malabar trevally was first scientifically described by German ichthyologists Marcus Elieser Bloch and Johann Gottlob Schneider in the massive 1801 volume of Systema Ichthyologiae iconibus cx illustratum, a book which is the taxonomic authority of many fish species. The species was first published under the name Scomber malabaricus, implying the species was related closely to the true mackerels. This was found to be incorrect, and the species was first transferred to Caranx, another genus of jack, and finally to Carangoides by Williams and Venkataramani in 1978, remaining there since. The species was also completely redescribed twice in its history, the first time by Williams in 1958 under the name Carangoides rectipinnus, and again in 1974 by Kotthaus, who named the species Carangoides rhomboides. These two names are considered junior synonyms under the ICZN rules for classification and therefore are discarded. In English, the species nearly always goes under the common name of Malabar trevally, with the name Malabar kingfish rarely used. A wide number of local names in other languages are also in use. Malabar is a region of southern India, from where the type locality of the fish, Tranquebar, was recorded.
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