Ichthyologic Fauna of Niulan River

Abstract

In Nov 2006 and Oct 2008, members of the Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ) took surveys of fishes in the Niulan River, a tributary of Jinsha River, Yunnan, and collected 42 fish species. According to the historical record and the fish specimens preserved in the collection room of KIZ, there are a total of 59 fish species in Niulan River, which belong to 46 genera, 12 families and 5 orders. Ichthyologic fauna of Niulan River were separately analyzed by traditional sorting method and the Value of Faunal Presence (VFP) method at the respective levels of order, family and genus. Two kinds of different ranking methods get two rather different results. Traditional sorting analysis indicated that some world-distributed families and genera had a small proportion in the Niulan River. On the contrary, the VFP of some endemic families and genera turned out to be relatively high. The families Amblycipitidae and Channidae have two genera and which distribute in Africa and south Asia, with the highest VFP. The genera Jinshaia and Metahomaloptera, which distribute in the Yangtze River, have a VFP of 100%. Pseudogyrinocheilus and Oreias have one species, with a VFP of 100%. The VFP method can reflect better the character of ichthyologic fauna than the traditional sorting method. By combination of these two methods, we analyzed the ichthyologic fauna of Niulan River, and then we compared it with the lower reaches of Jinsha River ichthyologic fauna from Shigu to Yibin, which indicated high comparability.