Journal
JOURNAL OF FISH BIOLOGY
Volume 96, Issue 5, Pages 1218-1233Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/jfb.13995
Keywords
allometry; biodiversity; central Africa; conservation; endemic; morphometrics; systematics
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Funding
- We gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistical support of The Nature Conservancy in Africa. E. Benjaminson and M. Dana at the Gabon-Oregon Center for Transnational Research provided additional funding that supported the travel of HKM, JHMB and other Gabonese researchers to study at the Oregon State Ichthyology Collection. Funding Source: Medline
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We present and describe a new species of Enteromius, adding to the 16 species of Enteromius currently recorded from Gabon, West Africa. This new species is distinguished from all other Gabonese Enteromius by the presence of several distinct spots on the dorsal fin in combination with three or four round spots on the flanks. In Africa, it is superficially similar to Enteromius walkeri and with which it shares an unusual allometry in that the proportional length of the barbels decreases as the fish grows. Nevertheless, one can distinguish these species by vertebral number, maximum standard length, the length of the anterior barbels, the length of the caudal peduncle and in most specimens, the number of lateral-line and circumpeduncular scales. These two species also inhabit widely separated drainages, with E. walkeri occurring in coastal drainages of Ghana including the Pra and Ankobra Rivers and the new species occurring in tributaries of the Louetsi and Bibaka Rivers of Gabon, which are part of the Ogowe and Nyanga drainages, respectively. Despite extensive collections in those drainages the new species is known from only two localities, suggesting the importance of conservation of its known habitat.
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