Threatened fishes of the world: the end of a series

Autor: Lynn D. Bouvier, David L. G. Noakes
Rok vydání: 2013
Předmět:
Zdroj: Environmental Biology of Fishes. 96:1135-1149
ISSN: 1573-5133
0378-1909
DOI: 10.1007/s10641-013-0174-y
Popis: Our series of manuscripts on Threatened Fishes of the World came to an end after a prolonged and increasingly depressing and frustrating history. Prolonged because the series extended from 1995 to 2013, much longer than was anticipated. Increasingly depressing because it became clear to even the most skeptical reader that the status of a great many fishes is a matter of real concern. Frustrating because the accounts mostly presented the same picture for almost every species. The species accounts range from the largest fish species, the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) to one of the smallest (Tanichthys albonubes), in freshwater, marine and brackish water systems (Table 1). The list includes some species that almost certainly are extinct, such as the Yangtze paddlefish (Xiphurus gladius), and some that are relatively abundant and widespread, such as the North American lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens). Some species have global distributions, other are restricted to a single desert spring (Cyprinodon diabolis). Several cautions are obvious for this species list. Since contributions were unsolicited, and judged on their individual merits, it is not possible to analyze or interpret these reports as any objective measure of the number or distribution of threatened fish species. That was never the intention of this series. Other publications (Helfman 2007) are definitive efforts that were designed to address those important questions (Albins et al. 2013). Similarly, it is not possible to draw any conclusions from our series on Threatened Fishes as to the geographic, phylogenetic or systematic distribution of species. In fact, some papers must be regarded as doubtful reports of threatened species, since they probably represent only local color variants of broadly distributed species that cannot be considered as threatened (e.g., the aurora form of Salvelinus fontinalis, Salmo trutta caspias). We still receive a few manuscript submission each year, although the journal website clearly states that we are no longer accepting manuscripts for the series. It proved to be increasingly difficult to judge the claimed threatened status for taxonomic units reported from areas with very limited information on species distributions and abundance. Helfman (2013) has done an admirable job to demonstrate the profound differences and difficulties that exist among different countries and jurisdictions where there is reasonable confidence for species identification and knowledge of population status. It is a simple exercise for any undergraduate ichthyology class in almost any place on earth to demonstrate that we have very limited information on the biology, ecology and population status of most local fish species (Scott and Crossman 1973). I organized an invited session on Threatened Fishes for the annual meeting of the AAAS in Chicago in February 2011. Several papers from that session are Environ Biol Fish (2013) 96:1135–1149 DOI 10.1007/s10641-013-0174-y
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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