Cyprinidae, A. d'Orbigny, 1844

4.7 | Cyprinidae View in CoL View at ENA

There are three species of Barbus distributed in the region. Barbus ciscaucasicus in northern parts of Georgia and Azerbaijan, B. cyri in the Kura and Aras drainage and B. rionicus in the Black Sea basin in the west Georgia. The recent study done by Levin, Gandlin, et al. (2019) has shown that Barbus goktschaicus does not differ from B. cyri genetically and they both are distributed in the Kura-Aras system. Therefore, B. goktschaicus is synonymised with B. cyri .

Capoeta capoeta is widespread in the Kura and Aras drainages. Occurs in Lake Sevan and in Lake Urmia basin. Capoeta sevangi from Lake Sevan is treated as a valid species by Gabrielyan (2001), Ninua and Japoshvili (2008) and Ninua et al. (2013) without presenting any evidence. Levin, Prokofiev, and Roubenyan (2019) identify the Capoeta from Lake Sevan as C. capoeta , and we follow Levin, Gandlin, et al. (2019) treating C. sevangi as a synonym of C. capoeta , also supported by our own (unpublished) molecular data.

Capoeta ekmekciae is considered to be endemic to the Eastern Black Sea basins from the Rioni River south to the Coruh. The molecular sequences that were analysed by Bektas et al. (2017) suggest that this species is very closely related to C. capoeta . After checking the morphological characters given by Turan, Kottelat, Gülsün Kirankaya, and Engin (2006) to distinguish this species from C. capoeta , we found them largely overlapping. As we could not find other distinguishing characters between C. capoeta and C. ekmekciae in our own materials, we treat C. ekmekciae as a synonym of C. capoeta.

Capoeta gracilis was described from the area of Isfahan in Iran, this name is not available for the Capoeta species in the Caspian Sea basin. Despite, the fish from rivers south of the Kura was often identified as Capoeta capoeta gracilis . This fish most likely belong to C. razii that was described from the eastern Caspian Sea basin in Iran by Jouladeh-Roudbar, Eagderi, Ghanavi, and Doadrio (2017). Jouladeh-Roudbar et al. (2017) already reported this species to be very widespread in the rivers of the Iranian Caspian coast north-west to the Choobar River, close to the Azerbaijan border.

Carassius gibelio is widely introduced all over the study area. It appeared in the late 1970-ies in Armenia ( Pipoyan & Rukhkyan, 1998), followed by record from Georgia in the middle 1980th by Daraselia (1985) (as C. carassius ). Currently C. gibelio is the most widespread and abundant invasive species which distribution ranges from lowland waterbodies as high as mountain lakes that are up to 2,100 m above sea level ( Bogutskaya et al., 2013; Gabrielyan, 2001; Japoshvili, Mumladze, & Küçük, 2013; Japoshvili, Mumladze, & Murvanidze, 2017; Kuljanishvili, Japoshvili, Mumladze, & Kalous, 2018; Oganesyan & Smolej, 1985; Pipoyan, 1993, 2012; Pipoyan & Rukhkyan, 1998). While C. gibelio and C. auratus can be distinguished by molecular characters (Rylková, Kalous, Bohlen, Lamatsch, & Petrtýl, 2013), there is no agreed set of morphological characters to separate both species and we cannot exclude that many records of C. gibelio actually refer to C. auratus . It should also be noted, that Carassius langsdorfi as an additional, superficially very similar species (Vetešník, Papoušek, Halačka, Lusková, & Mendel, 2007) is also expected to occur in the area.