FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 



485 



KEY TO GULF OF MAINE REMORAS 



Pectoral fins pointed; ventral fins attached to the belly for less than one-third of their length.. Shark sucker, p. 485 



Pectoral fins rounded; ventral fins attached to the belly for more than half of their length 2 



Dorsal fin of 29 rays or more; at most 17 plates in the sucker Swordfish sucker, p. 486 



Dorsal fin of only about 23 rays; about 18 plates in the sucker Remora, p. 487 



Shark sucker Echeneis naucrales Linnaeus 1758 

 Pilot sucker; White-tailed sucker 



Jordan and Evermann, 1896-1900, pp. 2269-2270, as 

 Echeneis naucrales Linnaeus 1758 and E. naucrateoides, 

 Zuiew, 1789. 



Description. — The most distinctive characters 

 of the shark sucker are mentioned above. It is a 

 very slim fish, 11 or 12 tunes as long as it is deep, 

 nearly round in cross section, and tapering to a 

 very slender caudal peduncle. The sucking plate, 

 reaching from close behind the tip of the snout 

 back over the nape of the neck even with the 

 middle of the pectoral fin, is about as broad as the 

 head, flat, oval, and with 20 or more very con- 

 spicuous transverse plates. The soft dorsal fin 

 (32 to 41 rays) and the anal fin (31 to 38 rays) both 

 originate about the mid length of the body, and 

 they both extend nearly to the base of the caudal 

 fin. Both of them taper, too, from front to rear, 

 but the anal is more concave in form than the 

 dorsal. The caudal fin is slightly concave in old 

 fish but in young ones its central rays are the 

 longest. The ventral fins are pointed like the 

 pectorals below which they stand, and their inner 

 rays are attached to the skin of the abdomen for 

 only a short distance. The broad-based pectoral 

 fins are set so high up on the sides that their upper 



margins are close below the overlapping edge of 

 the sucking plate. 



Color. — The general ground tint is slaty or dark 

 brownish gray, with the belly nearly as dark as the 

 back. Each side is marked by a broad darker 

 brown or sooty stripe with white edges, that runs 

 from the angle of the jaw to the base of the caudal 

 fin but is interrupted by the eye and by the pectoral 

 fin. The caudal fin is velvety black with white 

 corners, a character noticeable enough to give rise 

 to a vernacular name. The dorsal and anal fins 

 are dark slate color t>r black, more or less margined 

 with white. The pectorals ami ventrals are 

 black, either plain or more or less pale edged. 



Size. — Reaches about 38 inches. 



General range. — Cosmopolitan in warm seas, 

 north as a stray to Halifax, Nova Scotia, 19 on the 

 Atlantic Coast of North America. 



Occurrence in the Gulj of Maine. — So far as we 

 can learn no shark sucker of this species has been 

 reported from the Gulf for many years; in fact, the 

 only positive records of it there are for one taken 

 from the bottom of a fishing boat in Boston Bay 

 some time prior to 1839; M for a second reported by 

 Wheatland 21 from Salem Harbor (reidentified by 



" Leim Pro* i Scotian Inst. Bel., vol. 17. Pt. 4, 1930, p. xliv. 



*> Described and illustrated t>y Storer (Fishes of Mass., 1867, p. 210. pi. 32. 



'■' Jour. Essex Co., Nat. Hist. Soc., vol. 1, No. 3, 1852, p. 125. 



•Aryr^vr- 



% 



J 





Figure 251. — Shark sucker (Echeneis naucrales), 11-inch 

 specimen, Tortugas, Florida. Below, top view of head 

 of a specimen about 18 inches long from Boca Grande 

 Pass, Florida. Drawings by H. L. Todd. 



