Strange Crossostoma tinkhami

[mikev]

Thanks, you two!

Yes, it appears to be a somewhat different fish.

I suspect that the doubled stripes are not a species characteristics but the sign of age: the same thing happens to clowns, kuhlis, and some schisturas. But the face shape does look a bit different.

I'm still seriously confused. Fishbase entry for A.urophthalmus gives these two photos:




with the first one showing the typical A.Botia pattern, and the second being different. For A.Botia, they show:


huh

The first A.urophthalmus picture is actually the best match for the guys I have here, except that fishbase claims the species to have maxTL=4cm...cannot be.

This looks like another shady issue to investigate one day...perhaps some book on Indian Fish says something about the differences?

[The.Dark.One]

You're welcome!

I would say 1st and 3rd image are botia, 2nd prob urophthalmus, and last one looks like Lepidocephalus sp!

Kottelat (1990) classed urophthalmus as a synonym of A. botia, but Pethiyagoda (1991) and Menon (1987) class it as valid apparantley on a purely zoogeographical point of view. Talwar & Jhingran (1992) use the relative body depth to also seperate botia and urop. They sau urop has a deep body, its depth about 4 times in SL, and A botia as depth about 5 times in SL. This might not be reliable though due to age of fish, and sex etc. None of these works appears to solve the problem for definite. My guess is that it is valid.

[mikev]

You're welcome!

I would say 1st and 3rd image are botia, 2nd prob urophthalmus, and last one looks like Lepidocephalus sp!

Yes, this sure makes sense. Darn Fishbase, they sure don't pay much attention to what they post.
I assume that their 4cm Max on urop is BS...oh well, it would have been nice to have a miniature zipper species.

Kottelat (1990) classed urophthalmus as a synonym of A. botia, but Pethiyagoda (1991) and Menon (1987) class it as valid apparantley on a purely zoogeographical point of view. Talwar & Jhingran (1992) use the relative body depth to also seperate botia and urop. They sau urop has a deep body, its depth about 4 times in SL, and A botia as depth about 5 times in SL. This might not be reliable though due to age of fish, and sex etc. None of these works appears to solve the problem for definite. My guess is that it is valid.

Very interesting, thank you very much.

I doubt that depth/SL easy to go by, relative depth varies greatly among my pack of eight A.Botia's here, with sex I suspect being the major factor.