> Additionally, Jerry Allen found out that the fish described by Taylor in
> 1964 as Melanotaenia solata coming from the South Alligator River and until
> today seen as Melanotaenia splendida australis local colour variety indeed
> is a valid species. I believe this species is kept in the hobby - who has
> them?
This isn't necessarily the case and a lot more work needs to be done to
clarify this situation as it depends upon what M. s. australis really is
relative to other splendidas. Preliminary allozyme and mitochondrial DNA data
suggest it is a full species, nuclear DNA hasn't been able to tease them apart
yet. It has been long recognised that there are several populations of
redtailed fish within the range of M. s. inornata. The specimens examined by
Moritz's lab at the University of Queensland (which Jerry is basing his
comments on) had M. exquisita mtDNA, hence you can't really say anything about
what it is. If my permit for Kakadu comes through I will be making a bunch of
collections in this area in August to try and resolve part of this issue.
There are a number of problematic populations in the Darwin area and
hybridisation with exquisita and nigrans makes it more difficult to tease
things apart in terms of where inornata ends and australis begins (although we
know it is somewhere between the Daly and Mary rivers).
There are also problems within exquisita and gracilis too that need to be
resolved. At this stage I don't think the exquisita's from the Kimberley's/WA
are exquisita, I think they are more closely related to gracilis (although
they look more like exquisita it seems). Anyway, the morphological
differences between these species are trivial (first dorsal fin placement
relative to the anal fin, it is forward in exquisita, behind in gracilis).
Also, biogeographically it doesn't make sense and also ecologically since
exquisita is usually somewhat upland/escarpment in its occurrence while
gracilis is lowland. The "exquisitas" in WA are all lowland.
While we are at it.....preliminary allozyme data on trifasciatas from Darwin
and Cape York suggests they may be sufficiently different to be called
separate species, don't have any from the East Coast to compare them to.
Haven't sequenced fish from both areas yet though.
Tootles
Peter