Zoogeography of the fishes from Indochinese Inland waters with an annotated check-list

According to an unpublished bibliography of Indochinese freshwater fishes that I completed, 930 native fish species are known to occur in the inland waters of the Indochinese Peninsula, certainly making it one of the areas with the most diverse ichthyofauna. The study of this rich fish fauna is still in the discovery and survey stage and there is presently no up-todate reference work for this area. There are few useful identification guides for the various countries: Smith (1945) for Thailand, Taki (1974) for the Mekong basin in Laos and Kottelat (1985) for the cyprinids of Kampuchea. Day (1875-78, 1888) is still the last complete reference to Burmese and Indian fishes; Jayaram (1981) presents a more recent compilation for India and Burma, but as far as Burma is concerned, the coverage cannot be satisfactory as the author had access only to material collected before 1940. Mohsin & Ambak’s (1983) book on western Malaysian fishes suffers from several important flaws (see for example Zakaria-Ismail, 1983) and appears to be merely a summary of the [few] specimens collected by the authors. At the border of our area, Weber & de Beaufort’s (1913-1916) monographs on Cypriniformes and Siluriformes are still the major source of information on Indonesian freshwater fishes; Inger & Chin (1962) present a useful reference for Sabah. Chevey & Lemasson (1937) is the classical reference for fishes of the Red River basin; the recent book by Mai Dinh Yen (1978) on fishes of northern Viet Nam should replace it, but there are several drawbacks to a wider use of it: the nomenclature is outdated, it does not take into consideration works done in the Chinese Red River basin, it uses names first published (?) in government reports and which are not available and it has an almost confidential distribution (not to mention the language problems which is recurrent when working with South-East Asian litterature)(Kottelat, in opress). Systematic ichthyology in South China is now progressing at an accelerated pace and beside recently published books on fishes of Guangxi (Anon., 1981) and Hainan (Anon., 1986), a book on Yunnanese fishes is in press.