As some of you may have realised I am back in Australia for a little while
hassling more poor innocent fishes. One of my more important goals was to
collect Melanotaenia duboulayi from their NSW range. Thanks solely to
Jennifer Palmer we managed to get some from their southern most population.
Without her help we wouldn't have stood a chance of finding any there. We
flogged the Macleay River but couldn't find a rainbow to save our lives, even
in places where NSW Fisheries had caught hundreds of them. Mind you, we were
not there at the best time of year for finding bows....caught lots of gudgeons
and other more interesting fish than rainbows, but that didn't help us much.
Finally got onto gobs of them at their type locality in the Richmond River,
and then in the upper Clarence River. After that we headed up to Brisbane and
called in on the "Doc" who looked after us very well as usual. Thanks to
Bruce Hansen, Steve Brooks and Rob Wager we got some locality info on a few
fish were trying to locate and we were off again. One of my other goals was
to collect more carp gudgeons (Hypseleotris spp.). As many folks know their
taxonomy is an absolute mess, hence I am trying to get some work underway to
begin sorting it out. Things were going very smoothly until we hit the
Burnett drainage. Lakes Carp gudgeon are present in Barambah Creek (and
probably elsewhere), and I had collected them on my last trip there. This
time, having tried sorting out the species in the daylight I realised they are
just a mess here, my hypothesis here is Lakes carp gudgeon were introduced
along with hatchery golden perch or something similar from the Murray-Darling
drainage as this is the only place on the east coast Lakes carp gudgeon
occurs. Well, it looks like they have formed a hybrid swarm with Midgleys and
firetail gudeons, the only species I was sure about were western carp gudgeons
(which are less closely related to the other species according to another of
my hypotheses), other than that I couldn't identify any of the other carp
gudgeons with certainty, some had partially scaled heads, but with more scales
than Lakes normally have, none of the male colouration made any sense. After
searching a few other localities elsewhere in the Burnett we finally found the
three native species sympatrically to use as a comparison. Much to my
surprise I discovered the firetail gudgeons here do not have the distinctive
black anal spots in the females, or at least they don't seem to (which helps
to explain another unusual population of Hypseleotris in Waterpark Creek
drainage north of Rockhampton which I now think are firetails). Maybe Steve
Brooks or anyone else who has collected around here could add any insight. I
seem to remember catching firetails north of here in Deepwater Creek and the
Kolan and Baffle systems which had the black spots, but would have to check
the specimens to be sure. Another thing was the duboulayi's in the Burnett
are supposed to be blue, all the ones I saw looked green. Anyone else got any
comments on that? I've seen blue ones at Ron Bowman's place years ago, and
they were clearly very blue and supposedly from the Burnett.