An Annotated List of Fishes from the Coosa River System of Alabama

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A survey of the fish fauna of the Coosa River drain- age, a major tributary of the Alabama system, was conducted in June, 1959. Collections were made at 44 stations. The results of these and 10 collections made in previous years, plus records from the literature, show the fish fauna of the Coosa drainage of Georgia and Alabama to comprise 20 families and 85 species. Ten species are endemic to the upper Alabama system, and 10 represent new records for the Coosa drainage. Each collecting station is described and the species collected are listed. Annotations include notes on the morphology, color. and ecology of many of the species. The number of specimens collected at each station, and the size ranges are given for each species. A bibli- ography for each species is also included. The Coosa River is formed by the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers at Rome, Georgia. It flows in a southwesterly direction almost to Montgomery, Alabama where it joins with the Tallapoosa to form the Alabama. The Alabama River meets the Tombigbee to form the Mobile. the largest Gulf drainage east of the Mississippi. The purpose of this paper is to present data on the presence and distribution of the fishes of the Coosa River system which, along with similar data from other southeastern streams, will eventually result in establishing zoogeographic patterns, and which will contribute to our understanding of the divergence of the tippei Mobile basin fish fauna from that of the Tennessee from which it presumably originated. The first paper on the fishes of the Coosa River system was pub. lished by David Starr Jordan in 1877. Jordan listed 56 species from tributaries of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers in the xicinity of Rome, Georgia. Forty-six of Jordan's fishes are recognized as valid species. Twelve of the 13 species he described as new are recognized as valid species today. Jordan and Brayton (1878) expanded this list to include the entire Alabama basin and added one species to the list of known fishes of the Coosa River. In another paper, Jordan (1879) listed fishes from the Etowah River. Gilbert's (1891) report was the first to include fishes from the Coosa River of Alabama. Fowler's (1945) records are from Dekalb and Cherokee Counties, Alabama,