First Record of the Pompano, Trachinotus ovatus (Linnaeus, 1758), from the Southeastern Black Sea, with Molecular Characterization and Notes on Range Expansion

Trachinotus ovatus (Linnaeus, 1758), commonly known as pompano, is a warm-water carangid native to the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic that has recently expanded northward into the Turkish Straits System and the Black Sea. Here we report the first confirmed record of T. ovatus from the southeastern Black Sea, based on a specimen caught off Trabzon coast of the Black Sea in November 2025 by a local fisherman. The specimen was morphologically identified and genetically characterized using mitochondrial COX1, Cytb, and 16S rRNA gene regions. COX1 phylogenetic and haplotype network analyses revealed two strongly divergent mitochondrial groups among sequences labeled as T. ovatus in public databases. The Black Sea specimen clustered with available Mediterranean sequences and differed by only three nucleotide substitutions, whereas Pacific sequences differed by approximately 70–79 bp, a level of mitochondrial differentiation exceeding typical intraspecific variation and consistent with recent phylogenetic studies highlighting unresolved taxonomy within Pacific Trachinotus. For Cytb, comparative sequences were available from the Atlantic and the Pacific region, but none from the Mediterranean Sea. Within this dataset, the Black Sea specimen grouped with the available Atlantic references, while Pacific sequences formed a distant and isolated branch. No reference 16S rRNA sequences of T. ovatus were available in GenBank from any geographic region, and the 16S rRNA sequence generated here therefore represents the first publicly available reference for the species. These data confirm that the Black Sea specimen originates from the Mediterranean population and likely reflects a climate-driven northward range expansion. Continued monitoring is essential to determine whether T. ovatus will establish a persistent population in the Black Sea under ongoing warming and faunal restructuring.