Only possible if there were captive specimens! When you get some Pete I
wouldn't mind a couple of pairs.
Steve Brooks
----- Original Message -----
From: <PETER.UNMACK at ASU.Edu>
To: <rainbowfish at pcug.org.au>
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2001 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: [RML] New fishes
> On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Bruce Hansen wrote:
>
> > We, in the hobby of native fish keeping, have always felt that the South
> > Alligator fish were very different and spectacular - different body
shape
> > and even behave a bit different too. In fact in some ways behave more
like
> > a trifasciata - prefer moving water, less flighty, keep their colour
> > better etc , all little things.
>
> One could say that about a number of rainbowfish populations in Australia.
> :-) The few enzymes we looked at in Burdekin rainbows didn't show up
anything
> unusual, although Mark Adams at the South Australian Museum will at some
point
> have a very thorough look at many many enzyme systems which should
somewhat
> resolve these questions much better than we can now.
>
> > However my recollection of Taylor's "Melanotaenia solata" was that the
fish
> > came from Yirrkala and Groote Eylant which of course are locations to
the
> > far east of Arnhemland, in fact as far away as it is possible to get
from
> > the East Alligator River.
>
> That was where they were first described from. I think Jerry was just
making
> that assumption that they might be related or similar. Given solata have
been
> described it would be necessary to figure out their identity relative to
other
> populations in that area due to taxonomic naming priorities. They would
indeed
> be very interesting to look at, but at this stage I am not willing to do
the
> paper and leg work necessary to even begin to try and get them from the
wild.
> There are many interesting fishes from that region. The biogeographic
> boundary between western C. stercusmuscarum and Gulf of Carpentaria C.
> stercusmuscarum clades (http://www.peter.unmack.net/biogeog/clades) lies
somewhere
> in this region. Blyth River is the western form, Roper River is the Gulf
> form. Don't have anything from inbetween. Interesting that the
biogeographic
> break in this region is different in Craterocephalus and Melanotaenia.
>
> > Peter, if you get permission to go collecting in Arnhemland it will be
> > important to try to get some of the tris from Yirrkala which resemble M.
> > monticola or M. oktediensis more than a tri.
>
> > Cheers
> Peter
>