Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
TURKISH JOURNAL OF MARITIME AND MARINE SCIENCES, cilt.12, sa.2, ss.1-12, 2026 (TRDizin)
Trachinotus ovatus (Linnaeus, 1758), commonly known as pompano, is a warm-water carangid
native to the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic that has recently expanded northward into the
Turkish Straits System and the Black Sea. Here we report the first confirmed record of T. ovatus from
the southeastern Black Sea, based on a specimen caught off Trabzon coast of the Black Sea in
November 2025 by a local fisherman. The specimen was morphologically identified and genetically
characterized using mitochondrial COX1, Cytb, and 16S rRNA gene regions. COX1 phylogenetic
and haplotype network analyses revealed two strongly divergent mitochondrial groups among
sequences labeled as T. ovatus in public databases. The Black Sea specimen clustered with available
Mediterranean sequences and differed by only three nucleotide substitutions, whereas Pacific
sequences differed by approximately 70–79 bp, a level of mitochondrial differentiation exceeding
typical intraspecific variation and consistent with recent phylogenetic studies highlighting unresolved
taxonomy within Pacific Trachinotus. For Cytb, comparative sequences were available from the
Atlantic and the Pacific region, but none from the Mediterranean Sea. Within this dataset, the Black
Sea specimen grouped with the available Atlantic references, while Pacific sequences formed a
distant and isolated branch. No reference 16S rRNA sequences of T. ovatus were available in
GenBank from any geographic region, and the 16S rRNA sequence generated here therefore
represents the first publicly available reference for the species. These data confirm that the Black Sea
specimen originates from the Mediterranean population and likely reflects a climate-driven northward
range expansion. Continued monitoring is essential to determine whether T. ovatus will establish a
persistent population in the Black Sea under ongoing warming and faunal restructuring.