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New Records of Freshwater Fishes from East Timor

2004; Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory; Volume: 20; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5962/p.286327

0811-3653

Helen K. Larson, Bob Pidgeon,

Ichthyology and Marine Biology

In October, 2003, the junior author had the opportunity to visit East Timor and collect freshwater fishes from several localities: from rivers near Aileu in the central mountains across to Lake Ira Lalaro near the eastern tip of the island.This collection is significant as very little is known of the freshwater fish fauna of the island of Timor.Full details of the aquatic habitats encountered and their ecology will be published separately.Few freshwater fishes have ever been reported from Timor, and nearly all of them were obtained from localities in what is now West Timor in Indonesia or with no specific locality provided (e.g.Reuvens 1895: Weber and de Beaufort 1912Beaufort , 1922;;Allen 1991).Those with localities provided were mostly from around Kupang, Atapupu and Atambua.The most useful recent summary of Indonesian freshwater fishes (Kottelat et al. 1993) did not include Timor in its coverage.The provisional checklist of freshwater fishes of Nusa Tenggara (Monk et al. 1997) lists a few Timor species, but only general locations are provided.Species previously known from fresh water in Timor are listed in Table 1.At present, only one freshwater fish may be endemic to the island: Oryzias timorensis (Weber and de Beaufort, 1922), described from Mota Talau (near Atambua in West Timor).This species was not obtained during the present survey.The East Timor fishes were obtained from a range of habitats, Irom mountain rivers to coastal estuaries (Table 1).It must be noted that for some of the species listed in the table, the taxonomy of these is not resolved and/or the fish are difficult to identify, such as the Ireshwater eels Anguilla, species of the goby genus Awaous and the sicydiine gobies ( Sicyopterus, Stipliodon, Lentipes).Twenty-eight species are here recorded for the first time lor East Timor.Ten of these have also been reported from West Timor.Another 20 species are known from West Timor, a number of which are marine