Field Guide to the Fishes of the Amazon, Orinoco and Guianas (Princeton Field Guides) - Softcover

Van Der Sleen, Peter; Albert, James S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691170746 ISBN 13: 9780691170749

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The Amazon and Orinoco basins in northern South America are home to the highest concentration of freshwater fish species on earth, with more than 3,000 species allotted to 564 genera. Amazonian fishes include piranhas, electric eels, freshwater stingrays, a myriad of beautiful small-bodied tetras and catfishes, and the largest scaled freshwater fish in the world, the pirarucu. Field Guide to the Fishes of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Guianas provides descriptions and identification keys for all the known genera of fishes that inhabit Greater Amazonia, a vast and still mostly remote region of tropical rainforests, seasonally flooded savannas, and meandering lowland rivers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter van der Sleen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Marine Science Institute of the University of Texas, Austin. James S. Albert is professor of biology at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. He is the coeditor of Historical Biogeography of Neotropical Freshwater Fishes.

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"This is an extremely valuable guide to the genera of fishes in the Amazon. Contributors include every prominent ichthyologist working on Amazonian fishes today, making this an essential guide to the field."--Luiz A. Rocha, California Academy of Sciences

"Field Guide to the Fishes of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Guianas is an outstanding contribution to the field of neotropical ichthyology. There are no similar books on the market."--Jansen Zuanon, National Institute for Amazonian Research

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Field Guide to the Fishers of the Amazon, Orinoco & Guianas

By Peter van der Sleen, James S. Albert

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17074-9

Contents

Foreword by Michael J. Goulding, 7, 
Preface by Luiz R. Malabarba, 8, 
Acknowledgments, 9, 
Contributors, 11, 
General Introduction, 13, 
How to Use This Book, 23, 
Identification Key to Fish Families, 26, 
Photographic Guide to Fish Families, 35, 
The Fish Families, 69, 
Glossary of Technical Terms, 403, 
Literature Cited, 413, 
Photo Credits, 459, 
Index, 460, 

CHAPTER 1

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Amazonia is a vast and complex landscape, with a biodiversity unrivaled on the surface of the Earth. The Amazon River is the largest in the world by any measure, including maximum length from mouth to most distant headwater tributary (6,712 km or 4,195 mi), total catchment area (7.05 million km2 or 2.72 million mi2), area of seasonally flooded wetlands (250,000 km2 or 96,530 mi2), average annual water discharge (219,000 m3 second-1), and proportion of global river surface area (25-28%) (Goulding et al. 2003). Near its mouth as it approaches the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon is so wide that one cannot see across it from one bank to the other. Here the Amazon flows inexorably like an inland freshwater sea, discharging a volume of water into the Atlantic so immense that it accounts for about one-sixth to one-fifth of all the Earth's river water, depending on the year.

Many Amazonian headwaters arise as glacier and snow melt high in the Andes (>5,000 m or >16,400 ft), eroding the steep mountain slopes as they fall, and carrying with them a high sediment load. Other headwaters arise from clayey and sandy soils deep in the rainforest, where they are stained red by acidic plant compounds. Yet others originate on the crystalline granites of the Brazilian and Guiana shields, where the waters run clear. Some of these black- and clearwater headwaters of the Amazon basin are connected by permanent rivers (e.g., Casiquiare Canal), seasonally flooded swamps (e.g., Rupununi savanna), or occasional stream capture events, to headwaters of the adjacent Orinoco River and coastal rivers of the Guianas. Altogether these river basins constitute a biodiversity province known as Greater Amazonia (figs. 1, 2).

Greater Amazonia extends over more than 8.4 million square kilometers (3.2 million mi2) of northern South America. This enormous region is drained by hundreds of thousands of kilometers of terra firme (nonfloodplain) streams and small rivers that flow under a closed forest canopy, and tens of thousands of kilometers of larger lowland rivers that meander across broad and sunlit floodplains. At the start of the twenty-first century, most of Greater Amazonia remains covered with dense tropical rainforests. The region also includes other distinct ecosystems, such as the cloud forests in the Andean piedmont and the tabletop mountains (tepuis) of the Guiana Shield, seasonally flooded wetlands (Llanos) in the central Orinoco basin, seasonally burned tropical savannas (Cerrado) in central Brazil or Lavrado (also called Gran Sabana) in the western Guiana Shield, and coastal estuaries at the mouths of the Amazon (Marajó) and Orinoco (Amacuro) rivers.

The ecosystems of Greater Amazonia are home to the greatest concentration of species on Earth. This region is the global center of highest species richness for many groups of organisms, including flowering plants, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Greater Amazonia is also the center of diversity for continental (freshwater) fishes. From the torrential headwaters cascading off the Andes, to the murky waters of the large lowland river channels and floodplains, the fishes of Greater Amazonia thrive in astonishing abundance and diversity. To date more than 3,000 fish species have been described from Greater Amazonia, and dozens of new species are described every year.

This field guide provides descriptions and identification keys for all the known genera of fishes that inhabit Greater Amazonia. It summarizes our current state of knowledge on the taxonomy, species richness, and ecology of these fish groups, and provides references to relevant literature for species-level identifications. It is our sincere hope that the Field Guide to the Fishes of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Guianas will be useful to anyone interested in quickly and accurately identifying Amazonian fishes, including aquarists, aquatic biologists, ecotourists, environmental engineers, sport fishers, and fish taxonomists.

Evolutionary History of Amazonian Fishes

Paleogene Origins of Major Groups

Amazonian fishes trace their evolutionary origins to the super-greenhouse world of the Late Cretaceous and Early Cenozoic (120-50 million years ago or mya; Albert and Reis 2011). This was a time of Earth history without polar ice sheets, when tropical climates extended to high latitudes, and tropically adapted organisms like palm trees and crocodilians lived in the lands we call Greenland and Alaska today. Neotropical fishes diversified in concert with the major groups of plants and animals that dominate modern tropical rainforest ecosystems (Lundberg et al. 1998).

Over these immense time periods, different groups of Amazonian fishes diversified under a wildly diverse set of environmental conditions. Some of the most important general influences were the relatively stable, warm, and wet climates that prevailed globally at low latitudes for most of the Paleogene (66-23 mya), regional hydrological and climatic changes associated with rise of the Northern Andes and formation of the modern river basins during the Miocene (22-5 mya), and global cooling and eustatic sea-level changes during the Pliocene (5-2.6 mya) and Pleistocene (2.5-0 mya) (Albert and Reis 2011).

In terms of species richness, total abundances, and fish biomass, the Amazonian fish fauna is dominated by three major groups: Characiformes (including piranhas, tetras, and relatives), Siluriformes (catfishes of diverse sizes, shapes, and natural histories), and Cichlidae (including peacock basses, freshwater angel fishes, oscars, and relatives). Fossils from each of these groups ascribed to modern families and genera (Tremembichthys, Corydoras,Gymnogeophagus) have been discovered in Paleogene sediments (López-Fernández and Albert 2011). These fossils are direct evidence that at least some Neotropical fishes had diversified to modern forms more than 40 million years ago.

The formation of Amazonian fish fauna was thus a long, long time in the making. These myriad forms accumulated over the course of tens of millions of years, and across a geographical arena that included the whole continent of South America. In other words, Amazonian fishes did not arise as the result of a recent or rapid adaptive radiation. The great antiquity of Amazonian fish lineages is perhaps surprising, as they are much older than the rivers and drainage basins in which they live. The modern Amazon and Orinoco basins are in fact relatively young features of the South American landscape, having achieved their modern configurations from tectonic and erosional processes only in the past 10 million years or so, in association with the rise of the Northern Andes (Hoorn et al. 2010).

Formation of Megadiverse Fish Species Assemblages

The ecological and evolutionary reasons for the incredible diversity of Amazonian fishes have been debated for more than a century. Among the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691170746
• ISBN 13: 9780691170749
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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