A new species of Cyphocharax (Characiformes: Curimatidae) with a horizontal color pattern from the rio Tapajós drainage, Amazon basin, Brazil

Abstract

<jats:p>ABSTRACT A new species of Cyphocharax is described from the rio Mentaí, a tributary of rio Arapiuns, lower rio Tapajós basin, Pará state, Brazil. The new species can be distinguished from its congeners by the combination of a rounded dark blotch at the caudal peduncle and a pattern of horizontal stripes formed by series of conspicuous dark spots situated over the center of the scales on the lateral and dorsolateral surfaces of the body. The new Cyphocharax is compared with similar congeners as C. helleri, C. multilineatus, and C. pantostictos. Comments on the distribution of C. multilineatus are provided.</jats:p>

A New Species of Cyphocharax Fowler (Teleostei: Curimatidae) from the Rio Xingu, Brazil

“…The curimatid genus Cyphocharax Fowler (1906) includes 47 species that are broadly distributed across the Neotropics, from rivers draining the Pacific slope of southern Costa Rica to estuarine rivers and lagoons of the lower Río de La Plata drainage in northeastern Argentina (Vari, 1992a; Vari, 2003; Fricke et al, 2023). The diversity of the genus currently places it as the seventh richest within the Characiformes, and the 15th species-rich genus in the Amazon basin (Dagosta and de Pinna, 2019), with more than 20 known species of Cyphocharax , several of which have been formally described over the past few decades (Vari, 1992a; Vari and Blackledge, 1996; Vari and Chang, 2006; Vari et al, 2012; Wosiacki and Miranda, 2013; Melo and Vari, 2014; Melo, 2017; Bortolo et al, 2018; Bortolo and Lima, 2020). The discovery and subsequent descriptions of new species of Cyphocharax are particularly correlated with the substantial increase of sampling efforts in many Amazonian regions, and the continuous reexamination of various species complexes within the Curimatidae (Melo et al, 2016; Melo and Oliveira, 2017), such as the Cyphocharax spilurus clade (Melo et al, 2018).…”