Fishes of Australia

Brief description

Fishes are the largest and most diverse group of vertebrate animals, with almost 32,000 valid described species (Eschmeyer & Fong 2012). This is many, many more than the combined total of all other vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). Under the term "fishes" we include the jawless hagfishes and lampreys.

White (1790) described the first Australian fishes that were actually collected in Australia. Although some wide-ranging species that have distributions including Australia had already been described, White's eight species came from Botany Bay. Our diverse and often unique fish fauna now numbers more than 5000 species, and we're still counting.

For those interested in reading more about the discovery of Australia's fishes, find a copy of Brian Saunders beautifully written and illustrated Discovery of Australia's fishes : a history of Australian ichthyology to 1930.

Australia's marine environment is enormous, covering an area of about 9 million km2 with more than 36,000 km of coastline (including external territories outside Antarctica). That figure actually needs updating as Australia recently extended its maritime boundaries.

Habitats range from the coral reefs and tropical estuaries of the north, to cold temperate rocky reefs along the southern coast, as well as oceanic and deep sea habitats beyond the continental slope. As a result, Australia has one of the largest and most diverse marine fish faunas in the world.

Fishes not only come in a impressive array of shapes and sizes & they live in almost all aquatic environments in Australia. These include the hot desert springs, freshwater rivers, streams and lakes found on land, to mangrove swamps, coral reefs, seagrass meadows, turbulent coastal kelp forests, and the twilight zone and abyss of the deep-sea.

The freshwater component of the Australian fish fauna is very small relative to freshwater fish faunas found elsewhere in the world (Merrick 2006). Although small in number however, this fauna is diverse and unique, and includes jawless lampreys, sharks, sawfishes, the iconic lungfish, eels, galaxiids, hardyheads, rainbowfishes, cods, gobies, gudgeons and soles.

Like fishes everywhere, the distributions of Australia's fishes are determined by their biology, behaviour and historical origins. Most (nearly 75%) live in tropical marine environments. Northern Australia sits on the edge of the 'Coral Triangle', the Indo-Australian Archipelago, which has the highest biodiversity of marine fishes in the world.

Almost a quarter of Australia's fishes are endemic, meaning that they are found nowhere else in the world - and most of these (60%) live in cooler southern waters (Hoese et al. 2006).

The total number of Australian fishes continues to rise each year when new species are discovered or when species known to occur elsewhere are found in our waters.

Notes

Includes: images,taxonomy,habitat