Morone
Genus of ray-finned fishes
Morone is a genus of temperate basses native to the Atlantic coast of North America and the freshwater systems of the midwestern and eastern United States. Fossil evidence also suggests they inhabited Europe during the Paleogene and Neogene.
01Etymology
The word morone is an archaic variation of "maroon". American politician-naturalist Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764-1831) first coined the genus in 1814, describing all four species of "perch of New York" he included under the genus (only two of which still remain classified under the genus today) as having "ruddy", "scarlet", or "reddish, rusty and ochreous" fins. Species of Dicentrarchus were formerly placed in this genus, but can be distinguished by the presence of preopercular spines in Dicentrarchus.
02Species
The currently recognized species in this genus are:
| Image | Scientific name | Common name | Distribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Morone americana (J. F. Gmelin, 1789) | white perch | fresh water and coastal areas from the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario south to the Pee Dee River in South Carolina, and as far east as Nova Scotia, lower Great Lakes, Finger Lakes, Long Island Sound and nearby coastal areas, Hudson and Mohawk River system, Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay. | |
| Morone chrysops (Rafinesque, 1820) | white bass | widely across the United States | |
| Morone mississippiensis D. S. Jordan & C. H. Eigenmann, 1887 | yellow bass | Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana and may also be found in the Trinity River and the Tennessee River. | |
| Morone saxatilis (Walbaum, 1792) | striped bass | Atlantic coastline of North America from the St. Lawrence River into the Gulf of Mexico to approximately Louisiana. |
The following fossil species are also known from Europe:
- †Morone aequalis (Koken, 1891) - Miocene of Germany (=Morone alsheimensis (Meyer, 1859))
- †Morone delheidi (Storms, 1893) - Oligocene of Belgium
- †Morone major (Agassiz, 1844) - Eocene of France
- †Morone shizurus (Agassiz, 1844) - Eocene of Italy
- ?†Morone ubinoi (Fischer von Waldenheim, 1850) - Cenozoic of Greece (nomen dubium)
The fossil species †Morone ionkoi Bannikov, 1993 may be potentially more closely related to Dicentrarchus. Many other fossil Morone species from the former Yugoslavian region likely do not belong to the Moronidae at all.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Morone”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Morone chrysops1.jpg by Unknown author, Public domain
- Morone sp.jpg by Ghedoghedo, CC BY-SA 4.0
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