Euthynnus alletteratus (Rafinesque, 1810)

Edwards, A. J., Gill, A. C. & Abohweyere, P. O., 2003, A revision of F. R. Irvine’s Ghanaian marine fishes in the collections of The Natural History Museum, London, Journal of Natural History 37 (18), pp. 2213-2267 : 2252

Euthynnus alletteratus (Rafinesque, 1810)

Irvine name. Listed correctly under the name above but one specimen (A. P. Brown 4) was misidentified as Auxis rochei (Risso) .

Reference material. Accra, September 1938 (Irvine 338); Accra, January 1939 (Irvine 390)— BMNH 1939.7.12.32 (one: 290 mm SL, 311 mm FL; H   of Euthynnus alletteratus aurolitoralis Fraser-Brunner, 1949 ); Labadi, January 1935 (A. P. Brown 4)— BMNH 1937.2.6.2 (one: 300 mm SL, 321 mm FL; P     of Euthynnus alletteratus aurolitoralis Fraser-Brunner, 1949 ; listed under Auxis rochei by Irvine).

Distribution. Coast of West Africa from Mauritania and Cape Verde Islands to Angola. Also known from the Mediterranean Sea and the western Atlantic.

Fraser-Brunner (1949: 626, figure 2b) used Irvine’s material as the basis for splitting E. alletteratus into two subspecies. Fraser-Brunner’s subspecific designation, which separates West African (‘southern’ populations) of the species from ‘northern’ ones from the Mediterranean and North Atlantic (south to Senegal and Brazil), does not appear to have been recognized by later workers. The characters he used to separate the two subspecies were vague and the number of specimens examined very small (only the two specimens above for the ‘southern’ aurolitoralis subspecies) .

On average about 3000 tonnes of this species are caught in the region each year ( FAO, 2000), making it an important fishery species. Catches have declined greatly since the early 1990s.