A new catfish species discovered in Arunachal Pradesh’s Siang river has been named after a range forest officer in the frontier state’s Mouling National Park.
Specimen of the catfish
A team of researchers from the Zoological Survey of India‘s freshwater fish section, Laishram Kosygin, Pratima Singh, and Shibananda Rathi, obtained a specimen of the catfish from the Siang, which was eventually identified as Glyptothorax repair, a new sisorid catfish.
“It differs from its congeners in the Indian subcontinent by a combination of characters such as the presence of plicae on the ventral surface of the pectoral spine and first pelvic-fin ray and a posteriorly serrated dorsal-fin spine.”
“The body with two longitudinal pale-cream stripes, densely tuberculated skin, and the presence of numerous tubercles on the dorsal surface of pectoral and pelvic-fin rays also differentiate it from other related species,” the researchers said in their paper published recently in the journal, Zootaxa.
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The species is from the Jambung stream
According to the researchers, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin has 17 of the 24 genuine Glyptothorax species found in the Barak-Surma-Meghna basin.
The species is now only known from the Jambung stream, a tributary of the Siang river near Hawa Camp in Arunachal Pradesh’s Upper Siang district (Brahmaputra River basin), according to the paper.
Naming of the new species
S. Rupir Boli, a range forest officer in the Ramsingh area of Mouling National Park in Arunachal Pradesh, was honored with the new species’ named after his name, for his assistance in collecting specimens during the researchers’ first survey.
