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Melanotaenia patoti
Melanotaenia patoti — underwater photograph of a male, about 80 mm SL, Trangan Island — photo © Gerald R. Allen

Melanotaenia patoti

Weber, 1907

Patoti’s Rainbowfish

Species Summary

The Aru Archipelago, a cluster of islands on the shallow continental shelf between New Guinea and northern Australia, was largely overlooked by ichthyologists for a century after Dutch collectors first sampled its rivers in 1907–09. Aquarium enthusiast Heiko Bleher brought Aru rainbowfishes to hobbyist attention after visits in 2004 and 2007, and two expeditions in 2013 (organised by Gerald Allen, Mark Erdmann and colleagues, with genetic work by Peter Unmack) revealed the islands to be an unexpected hotspot of rainbowfish speciation: seven species in all, most found nowhere else. Melanotaenia patoti was one of two rainbowfishes collected on the Aru Islands by Dutch naturalists in the early 1900s and described by Max Weber in 1907, but it was later dismissed as a synonym of the New Guinea mainland species M. rubrostriata. Fresh collections and genetic analysis in the 2015 revision confirmed it as a valid, Aru-endemic species after all.

Etymology

The species is named in honour of W. J. Tissot van Patot, who collected fishes in Borneo for the Zoölogisch Museum, Amsterdam, including the type of this species.

Etymology compiled from C. Scharpf (2022), “Fishes of Sahul: An Etymological Survey (Part 5), the rainbowfishes (continued)”, Fishes of Sahul 36(4): 1968–1992, and etyfish.org.

Distribution & Habitat

Melanotaenia patoti is known only from the vicinity of the type locality on Trangan Island, the southernmost large island of the main Aru Group. Recent specimens came from a small creek near a footbridge close to a village, with slow flow over a soft, muddy bottom, abundant aquatic vegetation and leaf litter; M. senckenbergianus was also common at the same site.

Melanotaenia patoti
Melanotaenia patoti — Aru Islands — photo © Johannes Graf

Description & Comparison with Similar Species

Live males are greenish brown on the head, nape and forebody with silvery-white below, and four or five alternating greenish-brown and orange-red stripes on the upper sides, most conspicuous on the rear half of the body; the anal fin is white to orange at the base grading to grey outward. Although closely resembling the mainland M. rubrostriata in general body form, genetic data place Melanotaenia patoti firmly within the Aru ‘Australis’ group, closest to M. albimarginata and M. aruensis. It is best told from M. albimarginata by its plainer, unmarked colour pattern (versus that species’ dark mid-lateral stripe with a yellow stripe below and white-tipped caudal lobes), and from M. aruensis by a slightly deeper caudal peduncle.

Account compiled for Home of the Rainbowfish from G. R. Allen, R. K. Hadiaty, P. J. Unmack & M. V. Erdmann (2015), “Rainbowfishes of the Aru Islands, Indonesia with descriptions of five new species and redescription of M. patoti Weber and M. senckenbergianus Weber”, aqua, International Journal of Ichthyology, 21(2): 71–106.

References