The Vertebrate Fauna

Abstract

The ichthyofauna of the Indo-Malayan region has been worked extensively taxonomically and, although many nomenclatural problems exist, particularly in the Cyprinidae, and undoubtedly a number of species are as yet undescribed, most fish can be adequately defined. Herre (1940) gave a comprehensive bibliography to that date, Alfred (1964, 1966) reviewed most of the recent literature in his enumeration of the species found on Penang and Singapore Islands, and Mizuno and Mori (1970) compiled a reference list for the Southeast Asian region. The chorological patterns of the freshwater fish of the Malayan region are less well known because of irregular coverage by collectors and incompleteness of records even in the well-worked areas. The more common species with wide distribution have been neglected and often unrecorded in the pursuit of the rarer, systematically more interesting species or the faunal associations of special, limited habitats. The comprehensive surveys of freshwaters of Thailand (Smith 1945) and North Borneo (Inger and Chin 1962) have no counterpart for Malaya whose fauna, although sharing numerous elements and habitats, is in many respects different from those areas peripheral to the central Sundanian region (Johnson 1960, 1964).