[4] It has colonised the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, where it is still common in the canal and its associated salt lakes,[5] by Lessepsian migration, the first record was in the 1920s off Port Said, Egypt and has now extended as far north as south-eastern Turkey[6] and west along the North African coast as far as Libya[7] It has also been recorded in the freshwater Sea of Galilee in Israel where it was probably introduced among fry collected in a nearby estuary to stock the lake.

[8] Planiliza carinata is a pelagic and euryhaline species, which is also tolerant of wide temperature variations, occurring mainly in marine coastal waters migrating inshore to lagoons and estuaries where there is abundant macrophyte vegetation in the spring, moving out to deeper coastal waters in the winter.

A female may lay 24500 to 115258 eggs and the spawning season of L. carinata in Suez Bay may extend from November to March.

[10] Planiliza carinata was named in 1836 by Achille Valenciennes as Mugil carinatus in the book Histoire naturelle des poissons.

It was shown that there was a monophyletic group of three similar species which formed a species complex, Liza carinata in the Red Sea area, L. klunzingeri in the Indian Ocean from the Tigris-Euphrates Delta east to Bombay and L. affinis which is found in the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean (Hainan).