J Appl Ichthyol. 2018;1–4. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jai | 1 © 2018 Blackwell Verlag GmbH 1 | INTRODUCTION Fistularia petimba Lacépède, 1803 is widespread throughout the tropical and temperate Atlantic Ocean, the Indo‐West Pacific, and the surrounding waters of Australia and Hawaii along soft bottom coastal areas (Carpenter, Robertson, & Munroe, 2015; Fritzsche, 1976). Although the Mediterranean Sea is not considered as native habitat for Fistularia genus, F. petimba is the first Fistularia species recorded in the Mediterranean Sea. One specimen belonging to this species was captured off the southern coast of Spain in the western Mediterranean Sea in 1996 by Cárdenas, Berastegui, and Ortiz (1997). Following this, F. petimba had not been registered any‐ where in the Mediterranean Sea until a very recent study by Stern, Paz, Yudkovsky, Lubinevsky, and Rinkevich (2017) reporting of the presence of F. petimba in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The sec‐ ond Fistularia species encountered in the Mediterranean Sea is F. commersonii Rüppell, 1838, first observed near the Israeli coast of the eastern Mediterranean Sea (Golani, 2000). Unlike F. petimba, F. commersonii expanded so rapidly into the north and west, colo‐ nizing almost the entire Mediterranean in just 7–8 years (Azzurro, Soto, Garofalo, & Maynou, 2013; Golani et al., 2007), that it was nicknamed the “Lessepsian sprinter” (Karachle, Triantaphyllidis, & Stergiou, 2004). The goal of this study is to report the first occurrence of red cor‐ netfish F. petimba in Antalya and İskenderun Bays along the Turkish Coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, and also, in light of the swift ex‐ pansion of its congeneric F. commersonii in the Mediterranean Sea, to call attention to a new potential invader. 2 | MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of four F. petimba specimens were caught during the bot‐ tom‐trawl surveys conducted within the framework of two coor‐ dinated research projects targeting demersal fisheries resources along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. For one of the projects, trawls surveys were carried out on a monthly basis in Antalya Bay while for the other project; they were performed seasonally from Fethiye Bay to İskenderun Bay along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Altogether, 354 trawl hauls (242 in Antalya Bay) were made with R/V Arama 1 at depths from 20 to 680 m between June 2015 and July 2017. The first F. petimba specimen was captured in Received: 18 December 2017 | Accepted: 3 April 2018 DOI: 10.1111/jai.13715 SHORT COMMUNICATION First record of red cornetfish Fistularia petimba (Syngnathiformes:Fistulariidae) from Antalya and İskenderun Bays along Turkish Coasts of the Mediterranean Sea A. Ünlüoğlu 1 | S. Akalın 2 | İ. Dal 3 | E. M. Tıraşın 1 | C. M. Aydın 3 1 Institute of Marine Sciences and Technology, Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir, Turkey 2 Faculty of Fisheries, Ege University, İzmir, Turkey 3 Mediterranean Fisheries Research, Production and Training Institute, Antalya, Turkey Correspondence A. Ünlüoğlu, Institute of Marine Sciences and Technology, Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir, Turkey. Email: aydin.uoglu@deu.edu.tr Funding information General Directorate of Agricultural Research and Policies of the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock Summary Here, we report the first occurrence of red cornetfish Fistularia petimba in the north‐ eastern Mediterranean Sea. Altogether four specimens were captured; first two in Antalya Bay on 28 October 2016 and 26 November 2016, and the remaining two in İskenderun Bay on 21 May 2017 during the bottom trawl surveys along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. All specimens were young and more or less uniform in size (383, 335, 419 and 453 mm standard length). The possibility that F. petimba could become a new potential invader in the Mediterranean as its congeneric F. com‐ mersonii is cautioned against.