The cuskpout (Derepodichthys alepidotus) is a species of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Zoarcidae, the eelpouts. It is the only species in the monospecific genus Derepodichthys and is found in the eastern North Pacific Ocean.
cuskpout
SPECIES
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The cuskpout (Derepodichthys alepidotus) is a species of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Zoarcidae, the eelpouts. It is the only species in the monospecific genus Derepodichthys and is found in the eastern North Pacific Ocean.
==Taxonomy== The cuskpout was first formally described in 1896 by the American ichthyologist Charles Henry Gilbert with its type locality given as off Queen Charlotte Island in British Columbia. Gilbert placed his new species in a new monospecific genus Derepodichthys. It was originally considered to be a taxonomically unique species and was classified in the monotypic family Derepodichthyidae, which was thought to be intermediate between the eelpouts and the cusk eels in the family Ophidiidae. It was only known from the holotype but further specimens were collected between the 1960s and 1980s which allowed it to be redescribed by M. Eric Anderson and Carl Leavitt Hubbs who reclassified this taxon as incertae sedis within the Zoarcidae. Its position in the Zoarcidae was later determined to be within the subfamily Lycodinae.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).