Images attached to GBIF records (museum & herbarium specimens), from . Open licences; click for the record.
Panama Lightfish
Vinciguerria lucetia (Garman, 1899)
Vinciguerria lucetia is a species of marine ray-finned fish in the genus Vinciguerria known by the common name Panama lightfish. It is a small bioluminescent fish, with two rows of tiny photophores along its body. It is very abundant in the tropical Indo-Pacific where it makes large vertical migrations each day.
Descriptions from checklists and floras indexed by GBIF
Notes
Fig. 5 The COI sequences for five specimens (DL313, DL320, DL321, DL322, DL324) matched a reference sequence of V. lucetia (HQ010067, voucher SIO 09-204) with 100.0% identity and all other BLAST hits showed V. lucetia larvae are elongate and slender with ovoid eyes and usually possess a large melanophore ventrally near end of the caudal peduncle (Moser 1996).
Checklist of ichthyoplankton of NORI-D polymetallic nodule exploration claim (eastern Clarion-Clipperton Zone) during winter 2021
description
Panama Lightfish. To 6.6 cm (2.6 in) SL (Personal communication: Scripps Institution of Oceanography Fish Collection, La Jolla, California). Larvae found as far north as off San Francisco, northern California and metamorphosing individuals found as far north as central California (34 ° 54 ’ W) (Ahlstrom and Counts 1958) to northern Chile (Sielfeld et al. 1995), including Gulf of California (De La Cruz-Agüero and Galván-Magaña 1992). Depth: surface perhaps to 4,409 m (14,460 ft) (min.: Ahstrom and Counts 1958; max.: Personal communication: Scripps Institution of Oceanography Fish Collection, La Jolla, California). Deep records in both the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Los Angeles County Natural History fish collection databases are based on the maximum depth fished by a midwater trawl and may represent a catch shallower than the maximum depth.
Checklist of marine and estuarine fishes from the Alaska-Yukon Border, Beaufort Sea, to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Description
Vinciguerria lucetia is a small fish growing to a maximum length of about 5 cm (2 in). It is an elongated, laterally compressed species with a disproportionately large head which is compressed and conical, with a wide mouth and pointed snout. There are photophores on the head and two lateral rows of pearl-like photophores on the underside of the body. The dorsal fin is short and consists of thirteen to fourteen soft rays. The origin of the anal fin, which consists of fourteen to fifteen soft rays, is below the rear of the dorsal fin. The pectoral fins are set low on the body and the caudal fin is deeply forked. The dorsal surface of this fish is blackish, with a few dark-coloured transverse stripes, and the flanks and belly are silvery. There is a black spot at the tip of the tail.
Range & habitat
Vinciguerria lucetia is found in the equatorial water mass of the western Central Pacific and the Eastern Pacific at depths between about 100 and 500 m (300 and 1,600 ft). This fish is one of several that dominate the fauna of the Southern California Bight and which tend to make diel vertical migrations, rising to near the surface to feed at night and descending again to remain quiescent by day.
What it does
Vinciguerria lucetia is an epipelagic and mesopelagic species. It is oviparous, the eggs and larvae drifting as part of the plankton. The photophores appear during the course of metamorphosis from larval to juvenile fish; these may be involved in camouflage, species or sexual identification or prey attraction. This fish feed on copepods, krill and sergestid shrimps, crustaceans which also tend to make diel vertical migrations.
== References ==
Where it has been recorded
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Vinciguerria lucetia in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
From the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy and occurrence records (GBIF.org), with Wikipedia and the Source Library. GBIF species 2346829.