Serrasalmidae

Patel, Anika, 2024, Systematic Reassessment of the Serrasalmidae Family Using Molecular Markers, FishTaxa 33, pp. 21-30 : 25

Serrasalmidae Family

Because they are regarded as a luxury food in South America, the species in this clade are the most commercially significant in this family. Members of this group are used to cultivate most of the native species produced in Brazil's continental farming. Aquaculture of these species has shown to be an effective way to meet consumer demand while reducing the harm that large-scale commercial fishing exploitation causes to natural population stocks. Interspecific hybridisation, a conventional method of genetic improvement in culture systems, has been used to make interspecific crosses, mostly for the species Colossoma macropomum, Piaractus mesopotamicus , and Piaractus brachypomus . These hybrids are produced because they have better meat quality, are more resistant to cold, and develop more quickly than the original species. In some regions of Brazil, hybrids outnumber their parent species. For instance, species P production is higher in the midwestern region of the country, even if "Tambacu" productivity surpasses 8359 tonnes. With about 2,000 species currently recognised from several drainages in the New World and Africa, the order Characiformes makes up one of the major components of the freshwater fish fauna worldwide. In the past ten years, more than 300 characiform species— mostly from the Neotropics—have been reported, and the rate at which new species are being described is not slowing down. The abundance of both species and supraspecific taxa in the characiform faunas on either side of the Atlantic Ocean show a clear imbalance. There are over 220 known species in the order's African components. They extend south from the Nile River basin in the North African deserts to much of the rest of the continent, with the highest variety found in the wetter areas such as the Congo River Basin, West Africa, and Lower Guinea. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, which extends from the southwest parts of the United States south to Mexico, Central America, South America, and central Chile and Argentina, there are now over 1,700 species known to exist. All of the main drainage basins in South America have sizable and taxonomically overlapping assemblages of characiform species. From the swift-moving rivers and streams of the Andean piedmont and Neotropical cordilleras to the lentic backwaters of lowland flood plains in the Americas and Africa, characiforms inhabit a wide range of habitats. There are hundreds of medium-sized to large characiform species in these environments, in addition to dozens of tiny and small species. Many of the bigger varieties have ecological and economic significance, and some of them dominate the overall biomass of fish in different drainages. In lowland river systems, this and other characiform species are important for material cycling, intraecosystem energy exchange, and ecosystem engineering.