Tuesday 30 December 2014

A new species of Trout from southwest Anatolia.


The Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus originally described a single Trout species, Salmo trutta, to deascribe small Samonid Fish across Europe, western Asia and North Africa in 1758. Over the next two centuries, as the diversity of these fish was recognised, this species was split into a large number of sub-species, and with the event of genetic classification techniques in the late twentieth century, many of these upgraded to full species, with some species being formed from the spitting or merging of the former subspecies based upon genetic data. There are currently eleven species of trout recognized from northern and eastern Anatolia, with the taxonomic status of populations in the south and west of the country under review.

In a paper published in the journal ZooKeys on 10 December 2014, Davut Turan, Esra Doğan and Cüneyt Kaya of the Faculty of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences at Recep Tayyip Erdogan University and Mahir Kanyılmaz of the Mediterranean Fisheries Research, Production and Training Institute, describe a new species of Trout from Alakır Stream in southwest Anatolia.

The new species is named Salmo kottelati, in honour of the ichthyologist Maurice Kottelat, for his studies of the Fish of Europe and Asia. The fish are greenish to silvery in colour, with brown on the back and flanks, darker towards the dorsal (upper) surface. The males are slightly larger than the females, with adult male Fish measured at 122–210 mm and adult females at 98–208 mm. The males have longer heads and jaws and a greater mouth gape than the females.

Salmokottelati, (b) male and (c) female. Turan et al. (2014).

See also…

http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/a-new-species-of-minnow-from-southeast.html
A new species of Minnow from southeast Turkey.
http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/a-new-species-of-toothcarp-from-iran.html A new species of Toothcarp from Iran.            The Toothcarps of the genus Aphanius are the only Eurasian members of the Family Cyprinodontidae; all other members of the family are restricted to the Americas, where they are variously known as Pupfish, Flagfish and Killifish (the term Killifish is also used...

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