Epinephelus caninus (Valenciennes, 1843)

– Dogtooth grouper

Serranus caninus: Valenciennes, 1843: 10 (type description) (C); Steindachner, 1865: 404 (T); Vinciguerra, 1893: 304 (T).

Epinephelus caninus: Cadenat, 1935: 398-399 (C); Dooley et al., 1985: 16 (C); Pizarro, 1985: 171 (F); Brito, 1991: 103 (F); Franquet and Brito, 1995: 66 (C); Brito et al., 2002: 216, 230-231 (F, L); Báez et al., 2019: suppl. tab. (C); Freitas et al., 2019: suppl. tab. S3 (C).

An eastern Atlantic warm-temperate species, distributed along the Mediterranean Sea and, in the eastern Atlantic, from off Portugal and along the west coast of Africa from Morocco (Collignon, 1973 – rare) and Western Sahara (Cadenat, 1935 – frequent) to Angola, including the Mediterranean (Craig et al., 2011) and Canary Islands; not known from the Cabo Verde Islands (Heemstra and Anderson, 2016; Freitas et al., 2019; Froese and Pauly, 2020).

It is a very rare species in waters of the Canaries, and findings on the coasts (between 50 and 200 m depth) of the two easternmost islands – Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, the islands closest to the African continent – are possibly based on large vagrant individuals (Brito et al., 2002). It was originally described by Valenciennes in the Canaries in 1843 based on type material probably caught off the north-western African coast (Brito et al., 2002), and newly recorded in June 1978 based on two specimens from the western coast (off Ajuy) of Fuerteventura (Brito, 1991) and on three subsequent findings (data unknown) at Lanzarote (Brito et al., 2002). In the last two decades, a few large specimens have been sporadically caught off these islands (first author’s personal observation). Reported maximum size: up to 164 cm total length and 57 kg (Morales-Nin et al., 2005), but attains at least 1.8 m and 75 kg (Heemstra and Anderson, 2016), and a maximum weight of 78 kg was reported from Spain (Francour and Pollard, 2018). Spanish vernacular names: cherne moruno; cherne de ley.