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A revised checklist of the epipelagic and shore fishes of the Chagos Archipelago, central Indian Ocean
Richard Winterbottom and R. Charles Anderson
Abstract
A recent (Feb.-Mar., 1996) trip to the Chagos Archipelago, central Indian
Ocean, by one of us (RCA) resulted in 51 new records of fishes for the
islands. In addition, another 29 new records were discovered either in the
collections of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian
Institution, or were gleaned from the literature. In total, 80 new records
for Chagos are reported here. The checklist by Winterbottom et al. (1989)
recorded 703 species from Chagos, that total is raised to 773 species.
Eighty-nine changes in nomenclature from that used in the 1989 list are
documented. Three geographic localities (Indo-Pacific, Indo-west Pacific
and marginally on the Pacific plate, and Indo-west Pacific) account for
just over 80% of the fish fauna. The five most speciose families (numbers
of species in parentheses) are the Gobiidae (98), Labridae (63), Serranidae
(50), Muraenidae (41) and Pomacentridae (38), and these together account
for 38% of the total fish fauna.
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