Epinephelus aeneus (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1817)

– White grouper

An Atlanto-Mediterranean species; primarily distributed in the southern Mediterranean (Cadenat, 1935), southern Portugal and along the western coast of Africa from Morocco (Collignon, 1973 – south of Agadir, rare) and Western Sahara (Cadenat, 1935; Collignon, 1973 – very frequent) to southern Angola, including the islands in the Gulf of Guinea (Craig et al., 2011; Heemstra and Anderson, 2016; Froese and Pauly, 2020). Absent from the Azores, Madeira, Selvagens, Canary and Cabo Verde Islands (Freitas et al., 2019). Recently, it has penetrated into more northern latitudes both in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean: Corsica, France (Riutort, 2012), southern Bay of Biscay, NW Spain, 43°42’44”N (Bañón et al., 2017) or its northernmost occurrence in the eastern Adriatic Sea, Croatian coast, 44°06’46.9”N (Dulčić et al., 2006).

Material examined. – An adult, 895 mm TL (7.5 kg), off Punta del Socorro – Caletón de los Artillos, eastern Tenerife, 28°19’42”N 16°21’06”W, 70 m depth, F/V Kumbayah, 21 Oct. 2015, bottom trap (Fig. 4). After photography, examination and identification, the fish was sold at the fish market, which prevented its preservation.

It is a non-native species to the Canary Islands; the present finding constitutes the first record of E. aeneus for the Canaries. Specimens of this species from the northwest-African coasts have been permanently present in the fish markets of the Canary Islands since the 15 th century (Balguerías, 1993), where they are highly appreciated and consumed in traditional regional dishes. Spanish vernacular names: cherne; cherne blanco; cherne moruno.