Freshwater fishes of northern Australia

Abstract

Northern Australia is biologically diverse and of national and global conservation signicance. Its ancient landscape contains the world's largest area of savannah ecosystem in good ecological condition and its rivers are largely free-flowing. Agriculture, previously confined largely to open range-land grazing, is set to expand in extent and to focus much more on irrigated cropping and horticulture. Demands on the water resources of the region are thus, inevitably increasing. Reliable information is required to guide and inform development and help plan for a sustainable future for the region which includes healthy rivers that contain diverse fish assemblages. Based on a range of information sources, including the outcomes of recent and extensive new field surveys, this study maps the distribution of the 111 freshwater fishes (excluding elasmobranches) and 42 estuarine vagrants recorded from freshwater habitats of the region. We classify the habitat use and migratory biology of each species. This study provides a comprehensive assessment of the diversity and distribution of fishes of the region within a standardised nomenclatural framework. In addition, we summarise the outcomes of recent phylogeographic and phylogenetic research using molecular technologies to identify where issues of taxonomy may need further scrutiny. The study provides an informed basis for further research on the spatial arrangement of biodiversity and its relationship to environmental factors (e.g. hydrology), conservation planning and phylogentic variation within individual taxa.

A revision of the bioregionalisation of freshwater fish communities in the Australian Monsoonal Tropics

“…Furthermore, in line with Pusey et al. (), three species groups ((a) Zenarchopterus buffonis , Z. caudovittatus and Z. novaeguineae ; (b) Ophisternon bengalense and O. guttarale ; and (c) Leptachirus polylepis and L. darwinensis ) were collapsed into generic groups ( Zenarchopterus spp., Ophisternon spp. and Leptachirus spp.)…”

“…Species distributions for each catchment were primarily derived from three comprehensive and relatively recent reviews of fish distributions across the study region. These include reviews of the Kimberley region, northwestern Australia, from the Fitzroy River to the Ord River (Morgan, Allen, Pusey, & Burrows, 2011) and from the Fitzroy River to the Fitzmaurice River (Shelley, Morgan et al, 2018), northern Australia from the Keep River (immediately east of the Ord River) to the Annan River in Queensland (Pusey et al, 2017), and between the Annan River and the O'Connell River at the southern extent of our study area (Pusey, Kennard, & Arthington, 2004). Readers can refer to these papers for complete reference lists of the surveys that contributed to the underlying data.…”

Flow‐mediated predator–prey dynamics influence fish populations in a tropical river

“…Barramundi are a large predatory species common and widespread across northern Australia's rivers and coasts (Pusey et al, 2017).…”

Big floods, big knowledge gap: Food web dynamics in a variable river system

“…Moreover, the relationship between temporal variation in discharge and assemblage-level trophic responses in the Burdekin River provides a model applicable to other rivers across northern Australia given it shares both a flow regime and fish assemblage (Pusey et al, 2017) similar to many other northern Australian rivers. Three members of this assemblage (Amniataba percoides, Leiopotherapon unicolor and Hephaestus fuliginosus) occur sympatrically and often syntopically in nearly every wet-dry tropical river of northern Australia (Pusey et al, 2017). The four species within this family comprise a large proportion of the fish biomass in the river, second only to the detrivorous/algivorous gizzard shad Nematalosa erebi (Pusey, Arthington, & Read, 1998).…”

“…We are here primarily concerned with an assemblage defined by family, in this case Terapontidae, which exhibits relatively constrained intraspecific variation in diet (Pusey, Arthington, Stewart-Koster, & Kennard, 2010). Scortum parviceps, a herbivorous/algivorous species endemic to the Burdekin, is elsewhere replaced by other herbivorous species within the genus or within Syncomistes (Pusey et al, 2017). Three members of this assemblage (Amniataba percoides, Leiopotherapon unicolor and Hephaestus fuliginosus) occur sympatrically and often syntopically in nearly every wet-dry tropical river of northern Australia (Pusey et al, 2017).…”