Alburnus selcuklui, M. Elp, F. Şen & Özuluğ, 2015

Freyhof, Jörg, Kaya, Cüneyt, Bayçelebi, Esra, Geiger, Matthias & Turan, Davut, 2018, Generic assignment of Leuciscus kurui Bogutskaya from the upper Tigris drainage, and a replacement name for Alburnus kurui Mangit & Yerli (Teleostei: Leuciscidae), Zootaxa 4410 (1), pp. 113-135 : 121

Alburnus selcuklui , a synonym of A. sellal

Alburnus selcuklui was described by Elp et al. (2015) from the upper Botan River drainage in Turkey. The Botan is one of the major tributaries of the upper Tigris. Elp et al. (2015) distinguish A. selcuklui from A. sellal by having a rounded snout (vs. pointed) and very slightly projected lower jaw (vs. distinctly projected) and having 10–15 gill rakers (vs. 13–17). We examined 20 individuals of Alburnus from the type locality of A. selcuklui and found all characters largely overlapping ( Table 2 ). The gill-raker counts between both species reported by Elp et al. (2015) are largely overlapping and we count 12–16 gill rakers in our specimens of A. selcuklui and 10–17 in A. sellal ; the two species cannot be distinguished by this character ( Table 2 ). Indeed, Alburnus from the type locality of A. selcuklui have a very short and round snout and the lower jaw is not as much projecting beyond the upper lip ( Fig. 6e ). But this character state is not unique to this population and has also been found in other, geographically very distant populations as for example in the Great Zab drainage in Iraq (FSJF 3685, Fig. 6d ). We found no difference between A. selcuklui from A. sellal in any of the morphometric characters examined including the snout length ( Table 3 ). In our molecular dataset, fish from the type locality of A. selcuklui ( Fig. 6e ) share DNA barcode sequences with A. sellal . Without any morphological and/or molecular characters available to distinguish A. selcuklui from A. sellal , we treat A. selcuklui as a synonym of A. sellal .

Figures

FIGURE 6. Alburnus sellal, from the top, a, not preserved, about 100 mm SL: Turkey: upper Göksu, a tributary of the Tigris south of Diyarbakır; b, FSJF 2224, 140 mm SL: Iran: River Kor north of Shiraz; c, FSJF 2870, 88 mm SL: Turkey: Tigris at Maden; d, FSJF 3685, 142 mm SL: Iraq: Choman at Nawprdan; e, FSJF 3679, 117 mm SL, from type locality of A. selcuklui, Turkey: stream Kesan about 3 km south-west of Güntepe.