MARINE RECORD Open Access First record of pilotfish Naucrates ductor (Linnaeus 1758), Carangidae, in the syrian marine waters (Levantine Basin) Nour Ali-Basha 1* , Adib Saad 1 , Nader Hamwi 2 and Abdullah Tufahha 1 Abstract This paper presents the first record of Naucrates ductor ( Linnaeus 1758) from Syrian waters. One specimen (300 mm TL, 294.29 g TW) was caught by purse-seine nets at about 60 m depth from Lattakia coast, on 25 September 2020. This record represents the first of this cosmopolitan species that entered the Syrian waters (Eastern Mediterranean). Keywords: Naucrates ductor, Pilotfish, Carangidae, Syrian waters, Levantine Basin Introduction The Carangidae family includes 147 species worldwide belonging to 30 genera (Nelson et al. 2016), from this high species diversity, 7 genera include 12 species are found in Syrian waters, from which one Aleps djedaba (Forsskal 1775) is an immigrant species from the Red sea (Saad 2005; Ali 2018). Pilotfish, Naucrates ductor (Linnaeus 1758) is a pelagic oceanic species almost cosmopolitan in tropical and sub- tropical seas, distributes in Eastern Atlantic: British Isles, the Azores and Madeira, Norway and Bay of Biscay to Namibia, including the Mediterranean and the Canaries, also it is common throughout the Indian Ocean (Smith- Vaniz 1986; Froese and Pauly 2018), and has occasion- ally been caught in the Black Sea (Bauchot 1987). Naucrates ductor has a semi-obligate commensalisms with large cartilaginous or bony fishes, turtles, marine mammals, ships and driftwood; juveniles often associ- ated with seaweeds and jellyfishes; larvae are epipelagic in ocean water. The link of pilotfish with floating objects is still not clear, though several hypotheses (protection, visual stimulus and help in predation) are suggested (Pipitone et al. 2000). Pilotfish feeds on host’s food scraps and possibly as a cleaner that consumes ectoparasites, also small fishes and invertebrates (Golani et al. 2006; Carpenter and Angelis 2016; Froese and Pauly 2018). It is mostly caught as by-catch of the seasonal (August through December) dolphin fish fishery in the Mediterranean using purse- seine nets around fish aggregation devices (FADs) (Reñones et al. 1999; Pipitone et al. 2000) and is of minor commercial value, however, this is not considered a major threat to its global population. It is therefore assessed as least concern (Smith-Vaniz et al. 2015). The species has been reported in Izmir Bay (Aegean Sea) by Akyol (2019), Libya (Southern Mediterranean sea) by Elbaraasi et al. (2019), in Egypt by Akel and Karachle (2017), and in the Adriatic sea (Glamuzina et al. 2017), also has been known from eastern Mediterranean (Ben- Tuvia 1971), but up to date there is no published evi- dence of the occurrence of this species in the Syrian marine waters (Saad 2005; Ali 2018). So, we present here the first confirmed occurrence of Naucrates ductor from Syrian waters. © The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. * Correspondence: dr.nour.alibasha@gmail.com 1 Marine Sciences Laboratory, Faculty of Agriculture, Tishreen University, Lattakia, Syria Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Ali-Basha et al. Marine Biodiversity Records (2021) 14:7 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41200-021-00202-y