MARINE RECORD Open Access First record of the flat needlefish Ablennes hians (Valenciennes, 1846) from Syrian marine waters (eastern Mediterranean) Firas Alshawy 1* , Amir Ibrahim 1 , Chirine Hussein 1 and Murhaf Lahlah 2 Abstract Background: Climatic changes and human activities have worked to pave the way for alien species to invade new areas far from their native habitats. Belonidae species (Needlefishes), spread into wide water bodies, and some exist in the Mediterranean Sea. Method: On 18/2/2019, a field trip was performed in the marine waters facing Banyas city, Syria (N: 35°14′35.11“, E: 35°55’12.56”); to collect fish samples using a gillnet, with assistance of fishing boat (9.5 m and 19HP). Fish individuals were identified, the morphometric measurements and meristic counts were recorded. Results: Two individuals of the Flat Needlefish Ablennes hians were caught from the marine water facing Banyas city-Syria. Conclusion: This study reveals that the Flat Needlefish A.hians exists in the marine waters of Syria (Eastern Mediterranean). It is recorded for the second time in the Mediterranean Sea, and Suez Canal is thought to be the main root of introduction. Keywords: Flat needlefish, Ablennes hians, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, Syrian marine waters Background Climatic changes and human activities have worked to pave the way for alien species to invade new areas far from their native habitats (Sandilyan et al., 2018). Climate changes have made the environmental condi- tions suitable for species to leave their original habitat due to temperature increase, salinity increase and food habit changes (Vallerga et al., 2003, Drago et al., 2004, RAC, 2009., Ibrahim et al., 2010, Eissa and Zaki, 2011). Human activities, such as Suez Canal opening, and ships movement across the world, open the road for marine species to move into new envi- ronments (Ibrahim et al., 2002, Zenetos et al., 2004, AlShawy et al., 2017, Alshawy et al., 2019a,b). Up to now, more than 100 Lessepsian fish species had in- vaded the Mediterranean Sea from the Indian and Pa- cific oceans and the Red Sea (Zenetos et al., 2012, Boussellaa et al., 2018). Belonidae species (Needle- fishes), spread into wide water bodies (Froese and Pauly, 2019), and some exist in the Mediterranean Sea (Whitehead et al., 1984, Carpenter and De Angelis, 2016). However, up to now, only two species of this family (Belone belone and Tylosurus choram) had been recorded in the marine waters of Syria (Ali, 2018). Hence, the present study reports that the Flat Needlefish Ablennes hians has been recorded for the first time in the marine waters of Syria, and for the second time in the eastern Mediterranean. Methods On 18/2/2019, a field trip was performed in the marine waters facing Banyas city, Syria (N: 35°14′35.11″, E: 35°55′12.56;(Fig. 1) to collect fish samples using a gillnet (18 mm mesh size, 3 m height, 200 m length: with dupli- cates), with assistance of fishing boat (9.5 m and 19HP). Fish individuals were identified according to Carpenter and Niem (1999), Hailey (2011) and Roul et al. (2018). The morphometric measurements (length to the nearest © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. * Correspondence: falshawy@gmail.com; firas.ahmad.alshawy@tishreen.edu.sy 1 Department of Marine Biology, High Institute of Marine Research, Tishreen University, Lattakia, Syria Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Alshawy et al. Marine Biodiversity Records (2019) 12:15 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41200-019-0174-5