Check List 14(3): 529-537, doi: 10.15560/14.3.579
Occurrence and distribution of tetraodontiform fishes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India
expand article infoVardhan Patankar‡§, Akhila Paranjape‡§, Zoya Tyabji‡|, Tanmay Wagh‡§, Aniruddha Marathe
‡ Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bengaluru, India§ Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India| Andaman Nicobar Environment Team, Centre for Island Ecology, Port Blair, India¶ Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, India

Corresponding author: Vardhan Patankar ( vardhanpatankar@gmail.com )

Academic editor: Hudson Tercio Pinheiro
© 2018 Vardhan Patankar, Akhila Paranjape, Zoya Tyabji, Tanmay Wagh, Aniruddha Marathe.
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: Patankar V, Paranjape A, Tyabji Z, Wagh T, Marathe A (2018) Occurrence and distribution of tetraodontiform fishes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. Check List 14(3): 529-537. https://doi.org/10.15560/14.3.579
Open Access
Abstract
Some fish groups are common on coral reefs, but we still lack fundamental information about how fish assemblages vary across seascapes. The order Tetraodontiformes, which includes pufferfish, triggerfish, shingles, porcupinefish, burrfish, leatherjacketfish, filefish, and trunkfish, is one such group. We systematically surveyed 75 sites around 52 islands of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago to evaluate the occurrence and distribution of tetraodontiform fishes. We recorded 25 species from 16 genera and 6 families. We found the distribution of fishes to vary between sites and geographical regions, with the southern Nicobar region having higher species richness than other geographical regions in the island group. Possible reasons for the observed patterns of the occurrence and distribution of tetraodontiform fishes are discussed.
Keywords
Species assemblages; reef fish; disturbance; distributional patterns; natural catastrophe