Taxonomy of Finfish (1+2)

5.1.2.1 Superfamily Cyprinoidea

Family CYPRINIDAE -minnows or carps. Freshwater, very rarely occurring in brackish water; North America (northern Canada to southern Mexico), Africa, and Eurasia.

Pharyngeal teeth in one to three rows, never more than eight teeth in any one row; lips usually thin, not with plicae or papillae (however, mouth sometimes suckerlike as in Garra and Labeo); barbels present or absent; upper jaw usually bordered only by premaxilla (i.e.. maxilla entirelv or almost entirelv excluded from gape); upper jaw usually protrusible; spinelike rays in dorsal fin in some. Pectenocypris balaena of the Kapuas River, Borneo, a phytoplankton feeder, has up to at least 212 gill rakers (Roberts, 1989). The primitive number of chromosomes appears to be 2n == 50 with some species having 48; polyploid states exist, e.g., tetraploids of 2n = 100, hexaploids. or octaploids, in three tribes of the subfamily. Cyprininae (e.g., in Carassius and Cyprinus ) (Buth et al.. 1991). The largest species are the tetraploid barbine Catlocarpio siamensis of Thailand, which is known to reach at least 2.5 m and probably 3 m and Tor putitora of the Brahmaputra River (eastern India), which reaches about 2.7 m; other large Asian species,(2 m or larger) include Elopichthys bambusa and Barbus esocinus. The largest north American cyprinid is Ptycltocheilus lucius of the Colorado River. Many species are under 5 cm and the smallest cyprinid and the smallest freshwater fish is Danionella translucida, a species described from Burma by Roberts in 1986, in which females are ripe at 10-11 mm and the longest specimen known is 12 mm. Recently Kottelat et al (2005) described a new genus Paedocypris with two new species Peadocypris progenetica and P. micromegethes from Sumatra with a fully mature female measuring just 7.9 mm.

The family Cyprinidae is the largest family of freshwater fishes and, with the possible exception of Gobiidae, the largest family of vertebrates. It may be artificially large relative, especially, to characiform and siluriform families. The common name for the family most frequently used in North America is minnow, while in Eurasia it is carp or barb or barbel.  Other common names associated with species of this family and sometimes with those of other families, are chub and shiner; additional common names are given with some of the genera, but in some cases these names are also used for members of other genera, and other names may also be used for species of the genus.           

Various members of this family are important as food fish, as aquarium fish, and in biological research. Species particularly widely used include the common carp (and koi) Cyprinus carpio, goldfish Carassius auratus and zebra danio or zebrafish Brachydanio rerio. The genus of the latter species. a popular aquarium fish that is being used extensively in genetic research. Fang (2000a), Fang and Kottelat (2000) and Kottelat (2000) preferred to use the name Danio rather than Brachydanio for the species with shorter dorsal fins and absent or incomplete lateral line (Full details in the Description of Danio).

The earliest definite cyprinid fossils are of Eocene age from Asia; the earliest European and North American ones are of Oligocene age (Oiajian, 1990; Cavender. 1991). Cavender presents reasons for believing that cyprinids were absent from North America in the Eocene, a time when other otophysans were present (catostomids. Hypsidorids, and ictalurids). Major extinctions occurred about 40 and 38 million years ago (Eocene) in the North American faunas when a marked global cooling occurred, perhaps as a result of altering ocean currents when Australia separated from Antarctica (with glaciation in the latter) and exchanges of Arctic and Atlantic waters with an opening between present-day Greenland and Norway.

The recognition and composition of the first seven subfamilies follows Howes (1991 a) and Rainboth (1991). Cavender (1991) and Cavender and Coburn (1992) prefer to recognize two subfamilies: those with “head usually kept relatively rigid when feeding and having relatively slow swimming movements in feeding” are placed in the Cyprininae, as recognized here, and those with a “head lifting mechanism when feeding and often feeding, with rapid swimming movements” in the subfamily Leuciscinae (the next six subfamilies recognized here). This corresponds with the two phyletic; lineages recognized in Chen et al. (1984) and Wu (1987): the Barbini with four subfamilies-the Tincinae, Barbinae. Cyprininae, and Labeoninae and the Leuciscini with six subfamilies: the Danioninae, Leuciscinae,  Culturinae, Xenocyprinae, Gobionina, and Acheilognathinae. The Psilohynchidae is recognized as a subfamily following the 1981 phylogenetic: study of Chen (Wu et al., 1981; Wu, 1987).