Gigantactis

Gigantactis is a genus of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Gigantactinidae, the whipnose anglers. The fishes in this genus have a circumglobal distribution in the deep waters of the tropical and temperate zones of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.

==Taxonomy== Gigantactis was first proposed as a monospecific genus in 1902 by the German zoologist August Brauer when he described Gigantactis vanhoeffeni. The type locality of G. vanhoeffeni was given as the Indian Ocean east of Zanzibar from Valdivia station 239 from the surface to a depth of . This genus was classified in the monotypic family Gigantactinidae in 1904 by the Belgian-born British ichthyologist George Albert Boulenger, with a second genus, Rhynchactis, being added by the English ichthyologist Charles Tate Regan in 1925. The fifth edition of Fishes of the World classifies the whipnose anglers within the suborder Certioidei within the order Lophiiformes, the anglerfishes.