Pteropterus is a genus of marine ray-finned fishes belonging to the family Scorpaenidae, the scorpionfishes. It is one of several genera in the subfamily Pteroinae which are colloquially referred to as "lionfish".
Taxonomy The genus Pteropterus was described by William Swainson in 1839. In 1882, Joseph Swain synonymized Pteropterus with Pterois. Since then, Pteropterus has been inconsistently treated as either its own genus or a synonym of Pterois, until 2023, when it was validated after it was discovered that Pterois was not monophyletic.
Pteropterus is most closely related to the genus Dendrochirus.
Species Species include: ImageScientific nameCommon nameDistributionP. antennatus (Bloch, 1787)Spot-fin lionfishTropical Indian and Western Pacific OceansP. brevipectoralis (Mandritsa, 2002)Western Indian OceanP. cinctus (Rüppell, 1838)Red Sea lionfishJeddah, Saudi Arabia, Red SeaP. mombasae (J. L. B. Smith, 1957)African lionfish, frill-fin turkeyfishtropical Indian Ocean and the Western PacificP. paucispinula (Matsunuma & Motomura, 2014)India to northern Australia (Timor Sea); north to southern Japan; eastward to Wallis and Futuna IslandsP. radiatus (G. Cuvier, 1829)Clear-fin lionfishRed Sea to Sodwana Bay, South Africa and to the Society Islands, north to the Ryukyu Islands, south to New CaledoniaP. sphex (D. S. Jordan & Evermann, 1903)Hawaiian turkeyfishHawaii
References