Harpagifer

Harpagifer, the spiny plunderfishes is a genus of marine ray-finned fishes, belonging to the subfamily Harpagiferinae, it is the only genus in this monotypic subfamily. They are found in the Southern Ocean.

==Taxonomy== The genus Harpagifer was described in 1844 by the Scottish naval surgeon, naturalist and Arctic explorer John Richardson, with Batrachus bispinis, a species which had been described in 1801 by Johann Reinhold Forster, as its type species by monotypy. In 1961 the American ichthyologist Theodore Nicholas Gill realised that these fishes were different enough from other Notothenioid fishes that they should be placed in their own family which called Harpagiferoidae, although this is now spelled Harpagiferidae. The name of the genus Harpagifer compounds harpagos which means "hook" and fero meaning "to bear", a reference to the spine on the operculum of H. bispinis.