Talk:sea ruffe
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First of all, the definition "Any of various species of saltwater fish in various families, or a specimen thereof, many species in the genus Sebastiscus." is pretty useless (I think they copied the wording from Doremítzwr's rather clunky definition at sea bass).
Secondly, I'm having trouble finding any reference to Sebasticus as "sea ruffes". The fact that they categorized this in Category:en:Perch and darters- which makes about as much sense as saying sea cows have hooves and horns- leads me to suspect "clue deficit disorder". I would appreciate it if someone familiar with marine biology (@Metaknowledge perhaps?) would take a look at this entry, and the one for sea perch (which has similar, if less severe, issues). Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 13:50, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
- WoRMS reports that Sebasticus is a misspelling of Sebastiscus (Sebastidae).
- Fishbase, which is pretty good for vernacular names, has no taxon that is called sea ruffe, nor anything close to sea ruffe in any language. The entries there for the three species don't have any similar vernacular name. sea ruffe at World Register of Marine Species doesn't have any such vernacular name. w:Ruffe (disambiguation) has a redlink for "Sea ruffe, Any fish of the genus Sebasticus. Google Books has more raw hits, mostly mentions however, for sea-ruff than for sea ruffe. I am having trouble finding any association at Books or Scholar between sea ruffe and Sebastiscus (or Sebasticus). DCDuring TALK 15:25, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
- I've never been that good at fish, but I know that ruffe proper don't like salinity too much, so they don't live in the ocean. That rules out one identity for the mysterious sea ruffe.
- Secondly, sea ruffe is seemingly not attested; sea ruff and sea-ruff are, however.
- I can only find one paper that uses the term "sea-ruff" and connects it to a scientific name, and that name is Scorpaena porcus (though it's misspelt as Scorpaenia; the paper is Tsytsugina, 1969). I think the original of the paper is in Russian and this translation may be by someone who didn't know anything about fish.
- I have no idea where Wikipedia got its claim about Sebastiscus, and maybe we should leave them a citation needed.
- So, to conclude, I'm still at a loss on this one. Maybe you need a definition-finding wizard like @Kiwima more than a marine scientist. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 15:55, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
- Century 1911 had an entry saying sea-ruff was species of Pagellus.
- I really can't find more than one citation for any of the possible definitions.
- There is a Black Sea ruff, definitely marine, also called a scorpionfish. And σεβαστός (sebastós) appears in the etymology of a few genera of Scorpaenidae.
- All of the accepted species of Sebastiscus are of the Pacific, so any connection with the freshwater Eurasian ruff must be morphological similarity. DCDuring TALK 17:57, 26 September 2016 (UTC)