A new species of wrasse living off the Brazilian coast has been described by Osmar Luiz, Jr, Carlos Ferreira and Luiz Rocha. The new species has been named Halichoeres sazimai after Brazilian ichthyologist Ivan Sazima from Universidade Estadual de Campinas in São Paolo.

Halichoeres sazimai inhabit the Western South Atlantic off the southern and south-eastern coasts of Brazil where researchers regularly saw it foraging solitary on sand bottoms immediately adjacent to the lower end of rocky reefs. Occasionally, harems consisting of 5-10 specimens were also spotted. The fish was sometimes observed over the reefs as well, but usually stayed at a dept of at least 20 metres. According to the researchers, this may have to do with a preference for water colder than 18° C.

Halichoeres sazimai separates itself from its close relatives by having a white body adorned with a zigzag patterned midline stripe which is yellow or golden in females and juveniles and black and brownish in terminal males.

Sorry i have not found a pic of this species.

The paper has been published in the journal Zootaxa.
“OJ, Jr, Luiz, CEL Ferreira and LA Rocha (2009) Halichoeres sazimai, a new species of wrasse (Perciformes: Labridae) from the Western South Atlantic. Zootaxa 2092, pp. 37–46.”

U.S. researchers John F. Switzer* and Robert M. Wood** have described a new species of darter from the Meramec River drainage of Missouri, USA. The new species has been named Etheostoma erythrozonum and is the first known fish species endemic to the Meramec River drainage. Its common name is Meramec Saddled Darter.

Etheostoma erythrozonum is a sister species of the Missouri Saddled Darter, Etheostoma tetrazonum, an inhabitant of the Gasconade River, Osage River, and Moreau River drainages. The Missouri Saddled Darter is one of several darter species endemic to the northern Ozark region of Missouri. When E. tetrazonum was first described, it was only known to exist in the

Osage and Gasconade River systems. However, within a year of its description, individuals of E. tetrazonum were identified from the Meramec River system, a tributary of the Mississippi River. Since then the distribution of E. tetrazonum has been considered to include the Meramec, Gasconade, Osage, and MoreauRiver systems.

In 1984, the first sign of E. tetrazonum actually being more than one species was found when an electrophoretic analysis unveiled considerable genetic divergence between populations of E. tetrazonum from the Meramec and Osage River drainages. This notion has now been supported by a recent molecular phylogenetic analysis of 13 populations of E. tetrazonum,

As a result, the specimens living in the Meramec River drainage have now been recognized as a separate species and the name E. tetrazonum will from now on only pertain to the specimens native to the Moreau, Osage, and Gasconade River drainages. As mentioned above, the Meramec River drainage species has been given the name Etheostoma erythrozonum.

E. erythrozonum is very similar to E. tetrazonum but without the prominent blue-green colouration. Some male E. erythrozonum darters do have a blue spinous dorsal fin base, but the blue colour is inconspicuous and never as outstanding as in E. tetrazon. (The anal fin of E. erythrozonum is also blue-green.)

Male E. erythrozonum darters sport a horizontal red-orange stripe that runs along the lower sides of the body from the pelvic fins to the anal fin with an irregular dorsal margin, while the male E. tetrazonum darter has a dorsal stripe with a well-defined dorsal margin in. Another notable difference between the two species is how E. erythrozonum has a series of irregularly shaped red-orange blotches instead of the well defined vertical bars seen on male E. tetrazonum darters.

The paper has been published here in the journal Zootaxa. Picture is Available in the online publication.

* John F. Switzer, U.S. Geological Survey, Leetown Science Center, Aquatic Ecology Branch, Kearneysville, West Virginia

E-mail: jswitzer@usgs.gov

** Robert M. Wood, Department of Biology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri

E-mail: wood2@slu.edu

Brachypopomus gauderio is not the only electric knifefish recently described from South America, U.S. researchers John P. Sullivan* and Carl D. Hopkins** have described another member of the genus Brachyhypopomus and given it the name Brachyhypopomus bullocki.

This new species is named in honour of Theodore Holmes Bullock, a renowned neurobiologist who died in 2005. Bullock was a pioneer of the comparative neurobiology of both invertebrates and vertebrates and is credited with the first physiological recordings from an electroreceptor and for championing electric fishes as a model system in neurobiology. The electric organ discharge waveform of Brachyhypopomus bullocki is biphasic, 0.9–1.6 milliseconds in duration, and the pulse rate varies from 20–80 Hz.

Brachyhypopomus bullocki is found throughout the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela and
Colombia. It can also be encountered in the in the Rio Branco drainage of Guyana and the Roraima State of Brazil, as well as in the upper part of Rio Negro near the mouth of Rio Branco.

Brachyhypopomus bullocki appears to prefer clear, shallow, standing water in open savannah, or savannah mixed with stands of Mauritia palm. It has also been collected among plants growing along the banks of small pools fed by streams. In Rio Negro, a specimen was found amongst palm leaf litter near the outlet of a black water stream.

Brachyhypopomus bullocki distinguishes itself from its close relatives by having larger eyes (comparative to the head), a short abdomen, and distally enlarged poorly ossified third and fourth branchiostegal rays.

The paper can be downloaded from Cornell University.

* John P. Sullivan, Department of Ichthyology, The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. Email: sullivan@ansp.org

** Carl D. Hopkins, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, New York. Email: cdh8@cornell.edu

Brazilian ichthyologists Julia Giora and Luiz Malabarba have described a new species of electric knifefish and named it Brachypopomus gauderio.

The fish lives in the central, southern and coastal regions of the Rio Grande do Sul state in Brazil, as well as in Uruguay and Paraguay, and its name is derived from the word “gaúcho”, a local term denoting a person living in the countryside (pampas) of the Rio Grande do Sul state, southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

Brachypopomus gauderio inhabits river banks, slow-moving creeks, lagoons, and flooded areas with muddy or sandy bottoms and has only been found among surfacing or floating plants.

You can distinguish Brachypopomus gauderio from its close relatives by its yellow dorsal surface, and on the brown markings which form a reticulate pattern.

I have not been able to find a picture.

The description has been published in the journal Zootaxa.

”Giora, J and LR Malabarba (2009) Brachyhypopomus gauderio, new species, a new example of underestimated species diversity of electric fishes in the southern South America (Gymnotiformes: Hypopomidae). Zootaxa 2093, pp. 60–68.”

The Top 10 list of new species from 2008 has now been compiled by the ASU institute and an international committee of taxonomists. Last year, thousands of new species were described by science, many of them native to hard-to-access regions of our planet, such as remote tropical areas or deep sea habitats, but two of the species on the list actually hail from much less exotic locations: Cardiff and a bottle of hairspray.

“Most people do not realize just how incomplete our knowledge of Earth’s species is,” said Quentin Wheeler, director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, which announced the top 10 new species list. “We are surrounded by such an exuberance of species diversity that we too often take it for granted“.

These are the selected few that made it all the way to the ASU Top 10:

1.) A palm with no close relatives in the neighbourhood

Name: Tahina spectabilis
Common Name: Tahina Palm

This plant produces truly spectacular inflorescence with numerous flowers. After fruiting, the palm dies and collapses. Strangely enough, the genus Tahina is not closely related to any of the other 170+ palm species found on Madagascar. Its closest relatives are instead found in Afghanistan, Thailand, Vietnam and China.

Soon after the publication of the species, seeds were disseminated throughout the palm grower community, raising money for its conservation by the local villagers.

2.) The world’s longest known living insect

Name: Phobaeticus chani
Common Name: This insect has no common name in English. Perhaps Chani’s stick insect would be a suitable English common name? Do any of the readers of this blog know if this species has a common name in Malaysia?

With a body length of 35.6 cm (14 inches) and an overall length of 56.7 cm (22.3 inches), Phobaeticus chani is the world’s longest known now living insect. Once upon a time, insects grew much larger than this, but none of those gigantic insects have survived into our time.

3.) The world’s smallest seahorse

Name: Hippocampus satomiae
Common Name: Satomi’s Pygmy Seahorse

This is the smallest known seahorse in the world. It has a standard length of no more than 13.8mm (0.54 inches) and an approximate height of 11.5mm (0.45 inches).

4.) The world’s smallest snake

Name: Leptotyphlops carlae
Common Name: Barbados Threadsnake

This is the world’s smallest snake with a total length of 104 mm (4.1 inches).

5.) A Welsh ghost slug

Name: Selenochlamys ysbryda
Common Name: Ghost Slug

The word ysbryda is a Latinized version of the Welsh word ysbryd which means ghost or spirit. The name alludes to the species’ ghostly appearance, nocturnal, predatory behaviour and the element of mystery surrounding its origin. Strangely enough, this new species was discovered in Cardiff, UK, a well-collected and densely populated part of the world. (For all the Torchwood fans out there, this mesmerizing find naturally comes as no surprise.)

6.) A snail with a surprising twist

Name: Opisthostoma vermiculum
Common Name: This species has no common name in English. Do any of the readers of this blog know it has a common name in Malaysia?

Most gastropod shells tightly coil according to a logarithmic spiral and have an upper limit of three coiling axes, but the shell of Opisthostoma vermiculum consists of four different coiling axes which is the highest number ever seen in gastropods. As if this wasn’t enough, the shell whorls detach three times and reattach twice to preceding whorls in a fairly consistent manner, which suggests that the coiling strategy is under some form of strict developmental-gene control.

7.) Deep-blue deep-dweller

Name: Chromis abyssus
Common Name: Deep Blue Chromis

Compared to other members of its genus, the deep blue Chromis abyssus lives pretty far from the surface but it is certainly not found at abyssal depths. The name is instead a reference to the BBC documentary Pacific Abyss, since the type specimen was collected during the making of this show. This species was also the first one to have its description registered in the newly launched taxonomic database Zoobank.

8.) A 380 million year old delivery

Name: Materpiscis attenboroughi
Common Name: Mother Fish

This is the oldest known live bearing (viviparous) vertebrate and we know of it from fossil record only. Amazingly, the fossil shows a female fish in the process of giving birth some 380 million years ago. It was found at Gogo Station in Western Australia. The name of the genus, Materpiscis, means “mother fish” in Latin, while the species itself is named in honour of Sir David Attenborough who first drew attention to the Gogo fish sites in his 1979 series Life on Earth.

9.) African decaf

Name: Coffea charrieriana
Common Name: Charrier Coffee

This is a true member of the genus Coffea, but it is completely void of caffeine. Coffea charrieriana is the first known caffeine-free Coffea species from Central Africa and coffee makers are now pondering the idea of using it to make natural decaf coffee.

10.) Hair spray bacteria

Name: Microbacterium hatanonis
Common Name: None

This new species wasn’t found in some remote rainforest or deep down in blue; it was isolated as contaminant of hairspray.

The Top 10 New Species were selected from the thousands of species fully described and published in 2008. The public could nominate species through the IISE Web site and nominations were also generated by IISE staff and committee members themselves. The Committee had complete freedom in making its choices and developing its own criteria to provide a breadth of species attributes and importance.

I am sorry that we don’t have pictures of all species. To see pictures of all species you can here.

If you would like to nominate a species for the 2010 Top 10 New Species please click here.

A new cichlid species has been described from the Río Negro and Río Tacuarí basins in the Uruguay River drainage by Uruguay ichthyologists Iván González-Bergonzoni, Marcelo Loureiro and Sebastián Oviedo.

The fish has been given the name Gymnogeophagus tiraparae (picture here) after María Luisa Tirapare, a Guaraní woman who founded the town of San Borja del Yí (no longer existing) close to one of the collecting localities for this fish.

Gymnogeophagus tiraparae is found in larger rivers with clear water over both sandy and rocky bottoms where underwater vegetation is scarce. The fish is decorated with two horizontal series of moderately elongated light blue dots between the dorsal fin spines, and a series of light blue stripes between the soft rays, sometimes merging with the second series of elongated dots. Between the series of dots, the body of the fish displays a red ground colour. On this spotty fish, the caudal fin is also adorned with dots, which are vertically aligned on the distal border. The body has no transversal bands at all. Another important characteristic is how the adipose hump on the head is located deeper than the upper border of the dorsal fin.

The description was published in the most recent issue of the journal Neotropical ichthyology.

González-Bergonzoni, I, M Loureiro and S Oviedo (2009) A new species of Gymnogeophagus from the río Negro and río Tacuarí basins, Uruguay (Teleostei: Perciformes). Neotropical Ichthyology 7, pp. 19–24.

* Guaraní is a group of culturally related indigenous people of South America who speak the Guaraní language. They are chiefly found between the Paraguay River and the Uruguay River.

In a recent issue of the journal Zootaxa, researchers Gertrud Konings-Dudin, Adrianus Konings and Jay Stauffer have described and named three new species of cichlid from the genus Melanochromis; two of them being fairly widespread among aquarists keeping African cichlids.

All three species hail from the eastern shore of Lake Malawi and belong to the group commonly referred to as Mbuna cichlids among fish keepers.

The fish you may have been offered under the name Melanochromis sp. “northern blue” (picture here) has been given the full name Melanochromis kaskazini. Just like its old trade name suggests, this Malawi cichlid hails from the northern part of the lake and the word kaskazini was choosen since it is the Kiswahili word for “northern”. (Kiswahili, also known as Swahili, is an African language spoken along the continent’s eastern coast.)

The “blue” part of its old trade name is a reference to the colour of the males; they are cobalt blue, while the females are white with a yellow or orange anal fin. Melanochromis kaskazini looks quite similar to its close relative Melanochromis lepidiadaptes but the latter one sports a suit of mensural characters not seen in Melanochromis kaskazini.

The Mbuna cichlid previously sold in fish stores as Melanochromis sp. “auratus elongate” (picture here) is from now named Melanochromis mossambiquensis. The fish is named after the country Mazambique since it is found along the Mazambique shore of Lake Malawi; a lake shared between the countries Mazambique, Malawi and Tanazania.

In Melanochromis mossambiquensis, the female fish is adorned with yellow stripes on the belly and a midlateral and dorsolateral black stripe that is narrower than the submarginal black band in the dorsal fin. The yellow stripes do not cover the entire lower abdomen, and the caudal fin features black spotting. The male fish is brown/black with white dorsolateral and midlateral stripes, and he displays a suite of mensural characters.

The third Mbuna cichlid, which does not have any trade name, has been given the scientific name Melanochromis wochepa due to its small size. Wochepa means “small” in Chinyanja, also known as Chichewa, a Bantu language spoken in south-central Africa.  I have not been able to find a picture at this time.

Melanochromis wochepa males are blue without any white striping, while the females sport a submarginal dorsal band that is wider than the mid-lateral and the dorsolateral stripe, thin abdominal yellow stripes never covering the entire lower abdomen, and a suite of mensural characters. The vomer is steep-angled in both sexes.

For more information, see paper published in Zootaxa: Konings-Dudin, G, AF Konings and JR, Jr Stauffer (2009) Descriptions of three new species of Melanochromis (Teleostei: Cichlidae) and a redescription of M. vermivorus. Zootaxa 2076, pp. 37–59.

A new species of Jupiaba tetra has been described by Brazilian ichtyologists Birindelli, JLO, AM Zanata, LM Sousa and AL Netto-Ferreira.

The fish has been given the name Juipaba kurua, a name derived from the type locality; the Curuá River which is part of the Xingu River drainage. The river name Curuá comes from the tupo language kurua.

Researchers analysed the gut content of these fishes to find out more about their habits and the results indicate that Juipaba kurua is an omnivore clearwater species that feeds along the entire length of the water column.

The faint dark Juipaba kurua is differs from its close relatives by sporting an elongate humeral blotch, a distinct dark spot on the caudal peduncle, and a pattern of dark spots on most of the scales on the sides of the body. The fish has teeth cusps of similar size and the lower jaw teeth gradually decrease in size posteriorly. The number of branched anal-fin rays varies from 21 to 24.

The description of Juipaba kurua was published in the latest issue of the journal Neotropical Ichthyology.

Birindelli, JLO, AM Zanata, LM Sousa and AL Netto-Ferreira (2009) New species of Jupiaba Zanata (Characiformes: Characidae) from Serra do Cachimbo, with comments on the endemism of upper rio Curuá, rio Xingu basin, Brazil. Neotropical Ichthyology 7, pp. 11–18.

Two new species of the genus Leporinus has been described from the Araguaia-Tocantins River system in the Amazon basin: Leporinus unitaeniatus and Leporinus geminis.

Brazilian ichthyologists Julio Garavello and Geraldo Santos describe them both in a paper* published in the most recent issue of Brazilian Journal of Biology.

Leporinus unitaeniatus

Leporinus unitaeniatus derives its name from its distinguishing colour pattern; uni is the Latin word for one and taenia means ribbon. This fish is adorned with a conspicuous longitudinal dark brown bar along the lateral line on the flanks. Other distinguishing characteristics are the slender and elongated body, the narrow snout, and the small eyes. The mouth is sub-inferior and filled with elongated, incisor-like teeth forming a straight cutting edge. There are 42–44 lateral line scales; 6 scale rows above and 5 scale rows below the lateral line; and 16 circumpeduncular scales.

Picture credit: http://www.scielo.br

Leporinus geminis

Juvenile Leporinus geminis fish look very similar to juveniles of the close relative Leporinus unitaeniatus, hence the name Leporinus geminis. Geminius is the Latin word for twin.

Leporinus geminis is decorated with three large and vertically elongated brown blotches on the trunk and has one inconspicuous dark bar on the body. The body is deep, the snout is blunt, and the eyes are large. The mouth is sub-inferior and fitted with large incisor-like teeth forming a curved cutting edge. There are 40–42 lateral line scales; 5.5 or 6 scale rows above and 5 scale rows below the lateral line; and 16 circumpeduncular scales.

Picture credit: http://www.scielo.br

* Garavello, JC and GM Santos (2009) Two new species of Leporinus

Agassiz, 1829 from Araguaia-Tocantins system, Amazon basin, Brazil (Ostariophysi, Anostomidae). Brazilian Journal of Biology 69, pp. 109–116.

A new species of the genus Chromaphyosemion has been described by Jean-Françcois Agnèse and his co-authors in a paper* published in a recent issue of the journal Zootaxa.

The new species, who has been given the name Chromaphyosemion campomaanense, belongs to the A. calliurum species group and was collected from the the Ntem River drainage in southern Cameroon. The name campomaanense is derived from Campo Ma’an National Park, the place where the fish was found.

According to the study, Chromaphyosemion campomaanense inhabits small streams and shallow pools in the rainforest. It prefers to stay close to the river bank and stays away from deeper areas with more fast moving water.

Chromaphyosemion campomaanense differs from its close relatives by displaying an asymmetrical colour pattern on the caudal fin consisting of a yellow lower margin and a white upper margin. The body is dark blue and adorned with red spots forming horizontal rows towards the head. Posteriorly, the rows merge into vertical rows. When researchers studied the genetic make-up of this fish they found that its karyotype distinguished it from the other species of the A. calliurum species group; it was
caracterized by unusually high number of chromosomes and arms compared.

The main focus of the study was to examine the molecular phylogeny of the members of the A. calliurum species group. Using a 760 base-pair fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene, researchers found the group to be composed of 10 species:

A. ahli
A. australe
A. calliurum
A. campomaanense
A. celiae
A. edeanum
A. franzwerneri
A. heinemanni
A. lividum
A. pascheni

* Agnèse, J-F, R Brummett, P Caminade, J Catalan and E Kornobisi (2009) Genetic characterization of the Aphyosemion calliurum species group and description of a new species from this assemblage: A. campomaanense (Cyprinodontiformes: Aplocheiloidei: Nothobranchiidae) from Southern Cameroon. Zootaxa 2045, pp. 43–59.