Cobitis avicennae Mousavi-Sabet, Vatandoust, Esmaeili, Geiger & Freyhof, 2015

Freyhof, Jörg, Bayçelebi, Esra & Geiger, Matthias, 2018, Review of the genus Cobitis in the Middle East, with the description of eight new species (Teleostei: Cobitidae), Zootaxa 4535 (1), pp. 1-75 : 10

Cobitis avicennae Mousavi-Sabet, Vatandoust, Esmaeili, Geiger & Freyhof, 2015

( Fig. 4 )

Cobitis avicennae Mousavi-Sabet, Vatandoust, Esmaeili, Geiger & Freyhof, 2015: 562 , figs. 3–4 (type locality: Iran: Hamedan prov.: Gamasiab River at Dehno, a tributary to Karkhek, 34.170 48.355).

Material examined. FSJF 3225 , 18 , 26–37 mm SL; Iran: Hamedan prov.: Gamasiab River at Solgi Sharak, a tributary to Karkheh , 34.281 48.157 .— FSJF 3231 , 10 , 31–56 mm SL; Iran: Kermanshah prov.: Sepidbarg River about 3 km west of Javanrud , 34.805 46.458 .

Material used in molecular genetic analysis. FSJF DNA-1994 ; Iran: Kermanshah prov.: Sepidbarg River about 3 km west of Javanrud , 34.805 46.458. (GenBank accession numbers: KP 050516 , KP 050525 ) .— FSJF DNA 2712 ; Iran: Kermanshah prov.: s tream about 1 km south-east of Dinawar, 34.573 47.456. ( BOLD accession number: EUFWF 2713-18 ) .

Diagnosis. Cobitis avicennae is distinguished from other Cobitis species in the Persian Gulf basin by having one lamina circularis in the male (vs. two in C. elazigensis and C. linea ) and distinct, large, dark-brown, usually horizontally elongated blotches in Z4 along the anterior part of the flank, roundish or vertically elongated on the caudal peduncle (vs. indistinct minute dark-grey roundish dots in Z 4 in C. kellei ).

Distribution. Cobitis avicennae is found in tributaries of the Karkheh and Karun Rivers, which are lower tributaries of the Tigris in Iran. Cobitis from the Little Zab River in Iraqi Kurdistan (Coad 2010) might also belong to this species.

Remarks. Molecular data presented by Perdices et al. (2018) and Mousavi-Sabet et al. (2015) and shown in Figure 1 , place C. avicennae close to C. faridpaki and C. saniae from the southern Caspian Sea basin and it might be speculated that its ancestors entered the Persian Gulf basin from the Caspian Sea basin by river captures. See below for details to distinguish C avicennae from C. faridpaki and C. saniae . Our own molecular data as well as Perdices et al. (2018) place C. avicennae in the C. taenia species group ( Fig. 1 ). Based on DNA barcoding C. avicennae is well separated from all other Cobitis included in this study and by a minimum K2P distance of 5.7% to C. faridpaki . It is also supported as an own PTP and mPTP entity.

Figures

FIGURE 1. Maximum likelihood estimation of the phylogenetic relationships based on the mitochondrial COI barcode region (TN93 model, discrete Gamma distribution for rate differences with 3 categories +G parameter = 0.3792. Nucleotide positions with less than 95% site coverage were eliminated, resulting in 590 analysed positions. Numbers of major nodes indicate bootstrap values from 1000 pseudoreplicates from the ML, NJ and MP method. A star denotes highest possible support from all three methods. Solid bars right to the specimen labels indicate species delimitation results from PTP followed by the results of the mPTP approach as dashed bars. Except to the outgroups and the branch to the right part of the figure, the tree is drawn to scale with branch lengths depicting number of substitutions per site.

FIGURE 4. Cobitis avicennae, GUIC CC1462MA, holotype, male, 68.4 mm SL; Iran: Gamasiab River. Photo: Hamed Mousavi-Sabet