Pempheris mangula vs. P. rhomboidea

The second species claimed by Koeda et al. (2014) for the Red Sea is Pempheris mangula Cuvier, for which they mistakenly list P. rhomboidea Kossmann & Räuber, 1877, type locality Eritrea, as a junior synonym. One would not expect to find P. mangula in the Red Sea based on its habitat alone, a coast of the mud-bottom Bay of Bengal. Randall & Bineesh (2014) now clearly show that P. mangula, based on the neotype collected by Bineesh from the type locality of Visakhapatnam, is not a senior synonym of P. rhomboidea . It is separated by its high gill-raker count of 30–34, compared to 27–30 for P. mangula, larger eye (6.95–7.5 in SL vs. 7.3–8.4 in SL for P. mangula), longer pectoral fins (2.85–3.2 in SL vs. 3.5–3.65 for P. mangula), and shorter prepelvic length (2.5–2.6 in SL vs. 2.65–2.7 in SL for P. mangula). Randall & Bineesh (2014) described the neotype from Visakhapatnam prior to Koeda et al. (2014), and a recent specimen from the type locality is shown in Fig. 3.

Furthermore, Koeda et al. (2014) mistakenly used DNA sequences from specimens from Oman and Mozambique to represent P. mangula, and thus found little genetic difference from Red Sea P. rhomboidea . Notably however, GenBank had COI sequences specifically from Visakhapatnam, publically available since 2007 (Lakra et al., 2011), but these were not considered by Koeda et al. (2014), since their studies were limited to the 16S marker. The COI sequences clearly show a 1.1% divergence (minimum interspecific distance by K2P and pairwise) between type-locality P. mangula and P. rhomboidea from the Red Sea (Randall & Bineesh, 2014) (Fig. 2).