Cirrhitops
Cirrhitops is a genus of marine ray-finned fish, hawkfishes from the family Cirrhitidae. They are found on tropical reefs of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Taxonomy Cirrhitops was described as a genus in 1951 by the South African ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith with Cirrhites fasciatus as the type species. When he described the genus Smith stated that it was monotypic as he considered that Cirrhites hubbardi, which had been described in 1941 by the American ichthyologist Leonard P. Schultz, was a synonym of C. fasciatus. The name of the genus has the name of the type genus of the family, Cirrhitus, suffixed with ops meaning that they species in the genus are similar in appearance to the species in Cirrhitus and Cirrhitichthys. In 1963 John Ernest Randall reviewed the hawkfish family Cirrhitidae and included two species within the genus, C. fasciatus and C. hubbardi. In that review he did note that C. fasciatus had a widely disjunct distribution with populations known from Hawaii and from the Mascarenes. In 2008, in a paper co-authored by Randall and Jennifer K. Schultz, the new species C. mascarenensis was described from the south western Indian Ocean based on genetic and morphological analyses. This