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A new species of trout discovered in Turkey

A new species of trout discovered in Turkey

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The new species is distinguished from the other members of genera by having fewer parr marks along lateral line, and a larger mouth gape and maxilla, which is a part of the fish jaw.

This image shows the new trout species Salmo kottelati.

In order to understand the rich genus diversity in Turkey, a group of researchers from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University, Faculty of Fisheries collected samples from more than 200 localities throughout the country between 2004 and 2014. The resulting paper, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, focuses only on the Salmo species distributed in the Alakır Stream drainage, from where the new species was described. It as named Salmo kottelati after Maurice Kottelat, who contributed to the knowledge of the fish fauna of Europe and Asia.

Most authors considered trout (S. trutta) to be a very variable species forming three major ecotypes (sea migratory, lacustrine, and riverine or brook).

Some forms or subspecies of S. trutta distributed in Europe and Asia were resurrected to the species level by Kottelat (1997). Later, species status of some North African species was discussed by Delling and Doadrio (2005) and of Balkan ones by Delling (2003, 2011). Kottelat and Freyhof (2007) tentatively recognised 29 species from European waters and mentioned that the status of several populations and nominal species was still not clear.

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