First comprehensive list of the coral reef fishes of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park, Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo)

Ditch Townsend

doi:10.15560/11.5.1762

Check List 11(5): e19361, doi: 10.15560/11.5.1762

First comprehensive list of the coral reef fishes of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park, Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo)

Ditch Townsend

Corresponding author: Ditch Townsend ( ditchtow@gmail.com )

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Townsend D (2015) First comprehensive list of the coral reef fishes of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park, Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo). Check List 11(5): 1762. https://doi.org/10.15560/11.5.1762

Abstract

A 573 species-long checklist of the fishes in this 50 km2 tropical marine park was created predominantly by combining an unpublished scientific survey from 1992 with a hobbyist’s large photograph collection from between 2006 and 2009. Of the Indo-Pacific region’s coral reef-associated fish species, 15.2% are found here. Drawn from 83 families, the most speciose are Pomacentridae (71), Gobiidae (68) and Lab-ridae (55). A regression formula using the Coral reef Fish Diversity Index (CFDI) for species seen in 1992 suggests the park hosts 464 species, compared with the CFDI-based estimate of 495 based only on da-ta collected between 2006 and 2009, and 596 for the combined Index. With only 62% of the Index’s species seen both in the earlier and later lists, the utility of the CFDI is questionable at a site or over a time-span like this.

Keywords

coral reef; fishes; Tunku Abdul Rahman Park; marine park; species richness; CFDI