Three new species of fish of genus Aborichthys of the family Nemachelidae have been spotted in Arunachal Pradesh.
As per reports, a team of researchers from the Department of Zoology of Dera Natung Government College of Itanagar has discovered the new species, which have been named Aborichthys uniobarensis, Aborichthys barapensis and Aborichthys palinensis.
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The discovery has been published in international journals like Asian Journal of Conservation Biology, Journal of Threatened Taxa and FishTaxa.
“The three fish species are distributed in streams like Senki, Barap and Palin, which are the tributaries of Brahmaputra river system,” Down To Earth quoted Prasanta Nanda, associate professor and head of the department of Zoology in the Dera Natung Government College.
Earlier, 11 species of the genus Aborichthys were discovered in the Eastern Himalayan region across a century, starting from the early 1900s.
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Besides, three of them were outside Arunachal Pradesh — in Bhutan, Meghalaya and West Bengal.
Aborichthys is an elongate and slender-bodied bottom-dwelling freshwater stone loach that inhabits the moderate-to-fast flowing water of mountain rivers, streams and drainages of the Brahmaputra river basin, according to Nanda. It is endemic to the eastern Himalayas.