Cobitis elazigensis Coad & Sarieyyüpoglu, 1988

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 : 16

Cobitis elazigensis Coad & Sarieyyüpoglu, 1988

( Fig. 9 )

Cobitis elazigensis Coad & Sarieyyüpoglu, 1988: 426 , fig. 1 (type locality: Turkey: Elazig Province: a creek at Cip, 15 km west of Elaziğ, in drainage of Murat Nehri, a tributary of Euphrates River; 38.700 39.083).

Material examined. FSJF 2495 , 15 , 88–132 mm SL; Turkey: Elazığ prov.: canal below Cipköy reservoir, at picnic area, 38.678 39.064 .— FSJF 2559 , 4 , 77–88 mm SL; Turkey: Adıyaman prov.: stream Eğri about 6 km south of Adıyaman, tributary to Atatürk damlake, 37.741 38.335 .

Material used in molecular genetic analysis. FSJF DNA-903 ; Turkey: Elazığ prov.: canal below Cipköy reservoir, at picnic area, 38.678 39.064. (GenBank accession numbers: KP 050510 , KP 050513 , KP 050514 , KP 050517 , KP 050527 ) .

Diagnosis. Cobitis elazigensis is distinguished from C. avicennae from the Iranian Tigris River drainage by having two laminae circularis in the male (vs. one).

Distribution. Cobitis elazigensis is widespread in the upper Euphrates River drainage south to the Atatürk reservoir. It might be more widespread in the Euphrates and records of Cobitis from the Syrian Euphrates (Coad 2010) might belong to this species.

Remarks. Erk'akan et al. (1999) identified this species as C. simplicispina but molecular data ( Fig. 1 ) place C. elazigensis in the C. linea species group ( C. linea , C. aliyeae , C. anabelae , C. erkakanae , and C. levantina ). See below for details to distinguish C. elazigensis from other species in the C. linea species group and from other Cobitis species found in the Persian Gulf basin. Based on DNA barcoding C. elazigensis is well separated from all other included Cobitis and by a minimum K2P distance of 4.7% to C. linea , also supported as PTP 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 9. Cobitis elazigensis, FSJF 2559, male, 75 mm SL; Turkey: stream Eğri; FSJF 2495, female, 122 mm SL; Turkey: canal below Cipköy reservoir.