Bodianus aya Bloch, 1790

Rodrigo L. Moura & Kenyon C. Lindeman, 2007, A new species of snapper (Perciformes: Lutjanidae) from Brazil, with comments on the distribution of Lutjanus griseus and L. apodus., Zootaxa 1422, pp. 31-43 : 37

[[ Bodianus aya Bloch, 1790 ]]

Bodianus aya Bloch, 1790 , described from Brazil after a pre-Linnaean work by the Dutch naturalist Marcgrave (1648), has been considered a Lutjanus species (e.g. Jordan & Fesler 1893, Meek & Hildebrand 1925, Lima 1965, Anderson 1967). However, because types are not extant and the original description of B. aya is not informative, the assignment of B. aya within the family Lutjanidae has been controversial. Lima (1965) and Anderson (1967) recognized Lutjanus aya (Bloch) as the commercially important “red snapper.” On the other hand, Rivas (1966) regarded Bodianus aya Bloch as a sciaenid, and distinguished two species of red snappers, the northern red snapper, L. campechanus (Poey) , and the southern red snapper, L. purpureus Poey , as previously suggested by Hildebrand & Ginsburg (1926) and Ginsburg (1930). Allen (1985), apparently following Rivas (1966), did not include L. aya in his list of nominal species of Lutjanidae. We examined Marcgrave ’s (1648) and Bloch’s (1790) descriptions and plates and could not assign B. aya to any known Atlantic Lutjanus species, and consider it to be an unidentifiable nominal species, as already suggested by Eschmeyer (1998). For the purpose of nomenclatural stability a petition should be submitted to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature requesting the suppression of the name Bodianus aya Bloch, 1790 .