Bangana Hamilton

E Zhang & Yi-Yu Chen, 2006, Revised diagnosis of the genus Bangana Hamilton, 1822 (Pisces: Cyprinidae), with taxonomic and nomenclatural notes on the Chinese species., Zootaxa 1281, pp. 41-54 : 41-42

[[ Genus Bangana Hamilton ]]

Introduction

Hamilton (1822) erected Bangana as a subgenus of Cyprinus Linnaeus (type species: Cyprinus carpio Linnaeus ) to accommodate ten species, and Jordan (1917) designated Cyprinus dero as its type species. However, Bangana was later regarded as an invalid taxonomic unit, and its included species were assigned to either Labeo Cuvier, 1816 (Jayaram 1981) or Sinilabeo Rendahl, 1932 (Wu et al. 1977). Kottelat (1985) resurrected Bangana and considered it to be a senior synonym of Tylognathus Heckel, 1843 . Bangana has since been widely accepted as a valid genus, with approximately 23 species recognized from southeastern and southern Asia (Kottelat, 1989, 2001b; Kottelat et al., 1993; Rainboth, 1996; Kullander et al., 1999).

Bangana , as currently defined by Rainboth (1996) and Kullander et al. (1999), shares distinctive characters with the species included in Sinilabeo by Chinese authors, and four Sinilabeo species reported by Chu and Chen (1989) from Yunnan, namely S. dero (Hamilton) , S. laticeps Wu and Lin in Wu, Lin, Chen, Chen and He , S. yunnanensis Wu, Lin, Chen, Chen and He , and S. wui Zheng and Chen , were placed in Bangana by Kottelat (1998). Three other species recorded by Wu et al. (1977) from the Yuan Jiang (Red River) basin were added later: S. lemassoni (Pellegrin and Chevey) , S. xanthogenys (Pellegrin and Chevey) , and S. tonkinensis (Pellegrin and Chevey) (Kottelat 2001b). In fact, Sinilabeo is a monotypic genus, for which the type species, Sinilabeo hummeli , was only recently described (Zhang, Kullander and Chen, 2006). It is endemic to the upper Yangtze River drainage, and all previously recognized Chinese species of Sinilabeo are now referred to Bangana (Zhang et al., 2006). However, the transfer of these species to Bangana is not straightforward, inasmuch as a few characters present in some of the species are not included in current diagnoses of Bangana . The present paper attempts to provide a revised diagnosis of Bangana , so as to include all Chinese species, with some notes on their taxonomy and nomenclature.

The total number of species of Bangana is somewhat problematical. The following species, which are tentatively referred to this genus, have not been recorded from China: B. almorae (Chaudhuri, 1912) ; B. behri (Fowler, 1937) ; B. elegans Kottelat, 1998 ; B. pierrei (Sauvage, 1880) ; B. sinkleri (Fowler, 1934) ; B. horai (Fowler, 1924) ; B. diplostoma (Heckel, 1838) ; B. gedrosicus (Zugmayer, 1912) ; B. ariza (Hamilton, 1807) ; and B. nigripinnis (Day, 1877) . Assuming all these species are valid and are correctly allocated to genus, the total number of species of Bangana would be 23.