New Sighting Record of Devil Scorpionfish Scorpaenopsis diabolus (Cuvier, 1829) (Scorpaeniformes: Scopaenidae) from Andaman Islands

Abstract

Andaman and Nicobar Islands, situated in the Bay of Bengal between 6° 45 ́-13° 45 ́ N and 92° 10 ́-94° 15 ́ E, consists of 572 islands, islets and rocks and covers a distance of almost 750 km North-South with a coastline of 1962 km, and bring in for India, an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of 600 thousand km. A comprehensive and authoritative account of fishes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands was published by Francis Day (1870). Rajan et al. (2013) listed a total of 1434 species of fish including 20 species of scorpionfishes. Worldwide there are about 231 species known in the family Scorpaenidae, of which 53 species occur on or in the vicinity of East Indian coral reefs (Allen and Erdmann, 2012). The fish fauna of Andaman and Nicobar Islands is one of the most diverse due to zoogeographically isolated from mainland and close to south Asian countries from where the most numbers of coral reef fishes are present.