New catfish species identified in Arunachal Pradesh's Siang river; named after forest officer

A new catfish species identified from the Siang river in Arunachal Pradesh has been named after a range forest officer in Mouling National Park in the frontier state.

Specimen of the catfish, which was later identified to be Glyptothorax rupiri, a new sisorid catfish was collected from the Siang by a team of researchers, Laishram Kosygin, Pratima Singh and Shibananda Rathi from the freshwater fish section of Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata.

"It differs from its congeners in the Indian subcontinent by a combination of characters such as the presence of plicae on the ventral surface of the pectoral spine and first pelvic-fin ray and a posteriorly serrated dorsal-fin spine.

"The body with two longitudinal pale-cream stripes, densely tuberculated skin and the presence of numerous tubercles on the dorsal surface of pectoral and pelvic-fin rays also differentiate it from other related species," the researchers said in their paper published recently in the journal, Zootaxa.

The researchers said out of the 24 valid species of Glyptothorax from the Ganga-Brahmaputra and Barak-Surma-Meghna basin, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin has 17.

The species is presently known only from the Jambung stream, a tributary of the Siang river near Hawa Camp in Upper Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh (Brahmaputra River basin), the paper said.

The new species has been named after S. Rupir Boli, a range forest officer of Ramsingh range of Mouling National Park in Arunachal Pradesh, for his help in collecting the specimens during the first survey by the researchers.

The Brahmaputra, known as the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet and Siang in Arunachal Pradesh is also called the Luit in Assam. It originates in Tibet and passes through India and Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.