Pungitius platygaster (Kessler, 1859)

Çiçek, Erdoğan, Fricke, Ronald, Eagderi, Soheil, Sungur, Sevil, Coad, Brian W & Hamdard, Mohammad Hamid, 2023, Fishes of Afghanistan; a revised and updated annotated checklist, Zootaxa 5305 (1), pp. 1-69 : 55

Pungitius platygaster (Kessler, 1859)

Remarks. This species was identified from Odessa and the side arm of the Dnieper River in Aleschki, Ukraine. It is distributed Eurasia into the Black, Caspian, and Aral Sea basins. Afghanistan is not included in the natural distribution range of the species. The presence of the species needs clarification.

The orders with the largest numbers of species in the ichthyofauna of Afghanistan are the Cypriniformes (88 species), followed by the Siluriformes (14 species), the Anabantiformes (4 species), the Acipenseriformes , the Salmoniformes , and the Cyprinodontiformes (3 species in each). At the family level, the Cyprinidae have the greatest number of species (36 species; 29.8% of the total species), followed by the Nemacheilidae (22 species), the Leuciscidae (12 species), the Danionidae (8 species), and the Sisoridae (6 species). Along the way, a total of 48 species previously reported from Afghanistan have been excluded from the checklist, either in the present study or in previous studies.

Out of 121 fish species distributed in Afghanistan, 44 species have economic importance, seven species have regional economic value, while 34 species have no economic importance. Although a total of 25 species are not of economic importance, they are caught and consumed as food by local people. Among the species that are generally found as exotic, eigth species are aquarium fish species while three species are potentially aquarium species.