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RE: KillieTalk Digest V3 #1622

Dr. Watters was the featured speaker this last weekend with the BKA
annual convention in England so it may be a few days before he answers.
I believe in his talk he mentioned these fish and actually mentioned
that there is now an official name. As usual, his talks were very
informative and very well received.

There was in the neighborhood of 200 very nice fish in the show.
Participation was lower than normal, presumably due to current events. A
very nice show in a beautiful area of England (Buxton, Derbyshire).

Steven G. Halbasch
Layton, Utah  

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Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2001 10:05:57 -0700
From: Barry Cooper <bjc3 at cornell_edu>
Subject: Re: Kilombero Notho

I just looked at the pictures on p83 and, as far as I am concerned, that
is a mislabelled fish. The fish pictured is N. sp. Kilombero, presumably
the TAN 95/4  locality. N. sp. Ifakara is an Aphyobranchius species. So
the fish you have, which looks like that on p83 is N. sp. Kilombero
"Minepa TAN 00-14" and the fish pictured is (presumably) a mislabelled
N. sp. Kilombero "TAN 95-4". They are the same species from different
localities.

It may be helpful to comment on how we name these undescribed species
when we collect them. Each collecting team can adopt a slightly
different approach, but on the trips I have been on we followed the
practice established by Brian Watters, Ruud Wildekamp and various
co-collectors over the years. The TAN 95-4 part is fairly obvious. It is
the fourth locality recorded on the 1995 trip. We also designate some
geographic feature, often using the river drainage system, or the name
of a nearby village. If you look at a good map of Tanzania you will see
that Ifakara is a town near the Kilombero River, which is part of the
greater Rufiji River drainage system. The area is in a large swampy
system. In 1995 Brian Watters et al found two, possibly three
undescribed species in that area (as I referred to in my previous post).
One was the fish now known as N. sp. Kilombero "TAN 95-4" (based on the
river system). The second fish, the Aphyobranchius, even though it came
from the same loca!
lity, could obviously not be called the same thing. Therefore it was
designated N. sp. Ifakara TAN 95-4. In 2000 we revisited the area and
recollected all three of the species (and others) in this area, although
not from exactly the same locality as TAN 95-4, which had been altered
by drainage work. We had a problem here. To avoid confusion we wanted to
use the designation N. sp. Kilombero, which was already familiar to
hobbyists, but the fish did not come from the same locality. We couldn't
just use N. sp. Kilombero "TAN 00-14", as that would imply the same
location. We therefore chose the designation N. sp. Kilombero "Minepa
TAN 00-14". When the fish is formally described and given a species
name, each locality will carry the same species name but have different
locality designations.

One other small point. Brian Watters and others have noticed over the
years that the / used in locality names could sometimes be misread, when
written on a fish bag, as a 1 (one). We have therefore chosen to use a
hyphen (e.g. TAN 00-14) and I would appeal to everyone to adopt the same
habit. It will remove one small source of mistaken identities.

I am copying this to Brian Watters. He may have further comments.

Barry

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