Victor de Brito‡, Paulo Andreas Buckup‡Corresponding author: Victor de Brito ( victordebrito.nf@gmail.com ) Academic editor: Mariangeles Arce H. © Victor de Brito, Paulo Andreas Buckup. 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:
de Brito V, Buckup PA (2019) The fish fauna of the upper Piraí drainage, a transposed mountain river system in southeastern, Brazil. Check List 15(1): 235-247. https://doi.org/10.15560/15.1.235 |  |
An annotated checklist of the ichthyofauna from the upper Piraí river drainage is provided. The Piraí river was a major right-bank tributary of the Paraíba do Sul river, but it has been artificially diverted to the coastal Guandu river system in southeastern Brazil to generate electric power and water for the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro. Based on our field sampling of 23 sites, 32 species belonging to 24 genera and 12 families were collected in 6 headwater tributaries of the Piraí river between 2009 and 2016. Phalloceros harpagos (Lucinda, 2008), Astyanax intermedius (Eigenmann, 1908), and Neoplecostomus microps (Steindachner, 1877b) were the most abundant and most widely distributed species in the samples. The sampled ichthyofauna is mostly composed by species from the Paraíba do Sul basin. Eight species are reported for the first time in the upper Piraí drainage, showing the importance of continuous ichthyofaunal surveys of fish in remaining areas of Atlantic Forest.