744 t of the California spiny lobster makes up 95%–97% of the total, with only small quantities of Panulirus inflatus and Panulirus gracilis. The fishing rights are held by 26 local co-operatives. The main legal restrictions on fishing for California spiny lobster in Mexico are a minimum landing size of , the prohibition of catching berried females, and a closed season: from February 16 to September 14, fishing for spiny lobsters is prohibited in a region which moves south along Mexico's Pacific coast during the season. The Mexican fishery for the California spiny lobster was the first Latin American fishery to be awarded the Marine Stewardship Council's sustainable fishery ecolabel, and the species is classed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. Names Panulirus interruptus is called the California spiny lobster by the Food and Agriculture Organization, but a number of other local, vernacular names exist, including California lobster, California marine crayfish, and red lobster in the United States, and and in Mexico. The preferred common name of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is simply spiny lobster. John Witt Randall described the species in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1840, based on material given to him by Thomas Nuttall. The exact locality is not known, being given only as "Upper California", but the most likely sources are the places where Nuttall was most active, namely Santa Barbara and San Diego. The specific epithet interruptus refers to the grooves on the abdominal tergites, which are interrupted in this species. Although originally placed in the genus Palinurus, the California spiny lobster was later transferred to Adam White's new genus Panulirus, together with other spiny lobsters that have long flagella on their first antennae. Related species The closest relatives are not the other species that occur in the East Pacific, but rather Panulirus argus from the Caribbean Sea and West Pacific species such as Panulirus japonicus, Panulirus marginatus, Panulirus pascuensis, Panulirus cygnus and Panulirus longipes; this relationship has been recovered from comparative studies of adult and larval morphology, as well as from molecular phylogenetics, using the sequences from cytochrome c oxidase and 16S ribosomal RNA genes. The California spiny lobster can be differentiated from the other species in the genus by the interrupted grooves across the abdomen; other species either lack grooves, or have grooves which span the entire body segment. References External links