Fish from the Mississippi Sound, near Ocean Springs, MS

Hi everybody,
It's been about a month since my trip to the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory located on the Mississippi Sound (which is attached to the Gulf of Mexico) in Ocean Springs, MS. I'm going to post a formal report as soon as my computer gets back up and running (trojan virus troubles). I'm on my girlfriend's computer and was looking through some of the pictures that I had taken on the trip. For now, I'd like to see if I can get ID help on some of the fish I wasn't sure on. We didn't have the best of ID guides on hand for some of our sampling.

Here's the first fish;

- I was told that it is some kind of Pinfish sp. I'm not familiar with that group of fish as a whole. It was taken along a marshy shoreline of the Mississippi Sound where the water was brackish.
The next fish;

- This fish was collected in the same area. One haul of the seine produced 4 or 5 diff. species of Killifish. That was fun. My guess here is a Saltmarsh Topminnow (Fundulus jenkinsi).
The next fish;

- a nice big Killifish. It looks an awful lot like a Striped Killifish (Fundulus majalis). Is there such a thing as a Longnose Killifish? Or are these just alternate common names for the same fish?
The next fish;

- this Mosquitofish sp. was collected in a tidal pool on Horn Island in the Gulf of Mexico. I counted the dorsal fin rays at 6. That seems to put me at the Western Mosquitofish. Does anyone see any reason this fish would be an Eastern Mosquitofish?
The last one for now;

- really common in the Sound. Local fishermen were calling them by all kinds of names...Pop-eye Mullet, Striped Mullet, Silver Mullet...I think I keyed them as White Mullet (Mugil curema). Any help on this one would be appreciated.


Thank you in advance for your help. A report is hopefully soon to follow!

Edited by NateTessler13, 10 April 2009 - 08:03 AM.

Your first killifish could well be F. jenkinsi, a species that is becoming scarcer with time. I've only caught a few around Dauphin Island in AL. Your second killifish is F. similis, usually called the longnose killifish but also called "tiger minnow" by local baitshops and fishermen. It is very similar to F. majalis, the striped killifish, which is found on the Atlantic coast from New Hampshire as far south as Flagler County, FL, where it's replaced by the longnose. There are subtle morphological differences between the two. At least one group of biologists are convinced the two species are really one, with clinal variation from NH in the north down to around Veracruz in Mexico. I've been poking along sequencing DNA (the cyt-b gene) from different populations of the two species, from Nantucket in the north as far south as Pass Christian, Mississippi. Preliminary data show very well-defined populations in a steady cline, arguably rather than two distinct speces (but that's always open to interpretation....). I hope to get to Flagler County, FL, and the Texas coast this summer for new population samples.