Grey mullets fed Rome—and confuse fish markets
Mugilidae—mullets or grey mullets—patrol coastal temperate and tropical seas worldwide, with some freshwater members. Mediterranean tables have eaten them since Roman times; ancient Egyptians pickled them. Two dorsal fins, tiny triangular mouths, no lateral line, and muscular stomachs mark the clan.
Detritus diets drove strange guts: powerful stomachs and complex pharynxes grind low-grade food. The family names the order Mugiliformes; once thought alone there, they now sit near Asiatic glassfishes (Ambassidae) in newer treatments.
Language muddies menus. In North America “mullet” usually means Mugilidae; in Europe “grey mullet” is Mugilidae while “red mullet” means Mullidae goatfishes. Order the wrong mullet and you get a different fish entirely.
The family holds about 78 species in 26 genera. Fin spines place mullets in the superorder Acanthopterygii; in the 1960s some authorities treated them as primitive perch-like fishes, while others grouped them with the silversides. The oldest known fossil, Mugil princeps, comes from latest Oligocene rocks at Aix-en-Provence in France. Mullets often leap clear of the water in two distinct ways: a clean, straight jump to escape predators, and a lower, sideways leap ending in a big splash, possibly to gulp oxygen-rich air for a small organ above the pharynx.
Because Mugil cephalus is so widespread and valued in aquaculture, its larvae have been studied closely; a 2021 study traced four embryonic and six larval stages of its skeleton, giving farms a baseline for spotting malformations. Egyptians ate a pickled, dried mullet called fesikh, and Indigenous people in Florida, Hawaii and North Carolina fished for mullet from at least the fifteenth century. Nineteenth-century American fishers wrote it off as trash fish, and in the 1960s Florida officials tried rebranding it as lisa to win back buyers.
Source: Mullet (fish)
