A new blind cyprinid fish from Iraq K. E. Banister Zoology Department, British Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD M. K. Bunni Natural History Research Centre, University of Baghdad, Bab-al-Muadham, Baghdad, Iraq Introduction Trewavas (1955) described a cavernicolous cyprinid, Typhlogarra widdowsoni, from a sink-hole near Haditha, Iraq (344'N, 4224'E). Earlier, A. G. Widdowson had captured examples of Typhlogarra from a deeper sink-hole called the Pidgeon Hole (sic) (Widdowson 1954) but none of these reached England. On October 21, 1977, Basim M. Al-Azzawi, a fish collector in the Natural History Research Centre, University of Baghdad, visited a sink-hole at the Sheik Hadid shrine near Haditha to collect some specimens of Typhlogarra. The significance of this visit is that it revealed two species of cavernicolous cyprinids, Typhlogarra and the new species which we have pleasure in naming after Basim Al-Azzawi. Recently, Greenwood (1976) described a blind, depigmented loach, Noemacheilus smithi, which shares its subterranean waters in the Zagros mountains with Iranocypris typhlops. Here was the first Asiatic cave system known to support two fully cave-adapted species. The rarity of this event was emphasized by Greenwood (1976) who thought that the Zagros mountain situation was paralleled only by that in the Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. To that very short list we can add only the poorly known Yardee Creek Wells, Northwest Australia where the synbranchid Anommatophasma candidum Mees ( = Ophisternon candidumfide Rosen & Greenwood 1976) and the goby Milyeringia veritas Whitley occur (Mees 1962), and now the waters below Haditha. Caecocypris basimigen. et sp. nov. COMMENTS ON THE GENERIC STATUS OF THE TAXON. Until recently, it was accepted practice to consider a cavernicolous species as generically distinct from its nearest epigean relative. The absence of e.g. eyes and pigment were implicitly regarded to be of more 'taxonomic' importance in determining the rank of the taxon than any similarities that the hypogean species and its relatives may possess. The characin Anoptichthys jordani Hubbs & Innes, the cyprinid Caecobarbus geertsi Boulenger and the synbranchid Typhlosynbranchus boueti Pellegrin demonstrate, by their allocated generic names, the theory behind this approach. Recent reconsiderations of some cavernicolous species on a phylogenetic basis have shown the illogicality of a generic level separation for the hypogean member of an epigean genus. Indeed, Greenwood (1976) wrote in his description of the cavernicolous Noemacheilus smithi 'Certainly no useful or phyletic purpose would be served by creating for it (N. smithi} a new genus that could only be defined on the basis of such features as eyelessness, depigmentation and other regressional trends associated with cave life....' Typhlosyn-branchus boueti, mentioned above, has now, on phyletic grounds, been transferred to the epigean genus Monopterus by Rosen & Greenwood (1976). Anoptichthys jordani and its subterranean congeners, which have been the subjects of many biological studies, have been shown to be interfertile with the epigean Astyanax mexicanus and have frequently been called as such although (as far as we are aware) the genus 'Anoptichthys' has not been formally synonymised with Astyanax (see details and bibliography in Mitchell, Russell & Elliott 1977). Roberts and Stewart (1976:304) could find no reason for maintaining a separate genus for the blind, rheophilic spiny eel Caecomastacembelus brichardi; Bull. Br. Mus. nat. Hist, (Zool.) 38 (3) : 1 5 1-1 58 Issued 29 May 1980 151
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