First record of the Starry Weever Trachinus radiatus (Cuvier, 1829) from the Madeira archipelago

Resumo

The Starry Weever (Trachinus radiatus Cuvier, 1829) is one of nine extant species of the Trachinidae family which typically inhabit sandy-bottomed environments. This species is wide-spread throughout the Mediterranean Sea and in the Eastern Atlantic from continental Portugal to Angola, including the Canary Islands (Seret & Opic 2011, Smith 2016). It has, however, not yet been recorded from the Azores, Madeira, and the Cabo Verde Islands. Carneiro et al. (2019) mentioned a museum specimen allegedly from Madeira Island in the Paris Natural History Museum (MNHN-IC-2005-2436,1925) but this specimen is not from Madeira, it is from Casablanca fish market (Iglesias pers. comm. to the second author).

We herein provide the first true record of T. radiatus from the Madeira archipelago, in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean.