First Record of Blue-Banded Wrasse, Xiphocheilus typus Bleeker 1856, from India

The fish family Labridae, commonly called as wrasses, is the second largest family of marine fishes in the world, which comprise 71 genera and 520 species (Froece and Pauly, 2015). There occurs 85 species belonging to 28 genera in Indian waters (Gopi and Mishra, 2014). However, it does not include the monotypic genus Xiphocheilus Bleeker. Westneat (2001) observed that this genus confined in distribution to the tropical western Pacific, extending into the Indian Ocean only in an area to the west of the Malay Peninsula. Froece and Pauly (2015) followed the same distributional range for this species.