Members of this family are known commonly as Firefish, Scorpionfish, Rockfish, Stonefish, or Lionfish (amongst others). They belong to the order Scorpaeniformes, which includes 35 families, 300 genera, and more than 1,000 species. They are important both in the marine aquarium trade and as food (those of us fish-eaters living on the west coast are familiar with “Pacific Snapper” which is not a snapper at all—it’s from the family Scorpaenidae). Fishes from the family Scorpaenidae are widely distributed throughout the oceans of the world (temperate and tropical), but the so-called lionfishes which are of the most interest to the marine hobbyist are indigenous to the tropical Indo-Pacific (although they have now established themselves along the eastern seaboard of the United States).