Pagothenia

Pagothenia is a genus of marine ray-finned fishes, belonging to the family Nototheniidae, the notothens or cod icefishes. These fishes occur in the Southern Ocean.

==Taxonomy== Pagothenia was formally described as a monotypic genus in 1936 by the American zoologists John Treadwell Nichols and Francesca Raimonde La Monte with the type species being P. antarctica which Nichols and La Monte were describing as a new species. P. antarctica was subsequently shown to be a synonym of P. brachysoma which was described by the German zoologist Paul Pappenheim in 1912. P. brachysoma is now regarded as a junior synonym of Notothenia phocae which was described in 1844 by the naval surgeon, Arctic explorer and naturalist John Richardson. Some authorities place this genus in the subfamily Trematominae, but the 5th edition of Fishes of the World does not include subfamilies in the Nototheniidae. Nichols and La Monte did not explain the etymology of the generic name but it may be a compound of the Greek words pagos which means "frost", being the root of the word pagophilia for someone who thrives or prefers to live in ice, and thenia which means "coming from" possibly a reference to the occurrence of P. antarctica under ice, the types being captured through a seal hole in crevasse filled with water.