Tetra Species Reclassified 2024

Corydoras were recently done, now I have learned that they've reworked several tetras now as well!

The actual publication is pay walled as of right now, but some of the changes are posted in the article.




@fishorama since I brought it up in another post

Now I have to get used to calling these guys bario forestii instead of moenkhausia forestii

Big shake ups .

Are all these reclassifications done or verified by genetic sampling??? Assuming so, and is this mostly possible now, because the equipment has become more readily available??? And maybe a good portion of the lab work are being done by college graduate students???

We’re finding, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, doesn’t necessarily make it a duck…

DNA teaches us that our eyeballs are not adapted to understanding what we see. They're great for telling us to eat this and not that, but the fine points are often things we can't see. We're learning so much, and those of us who aren't pros are chasing the learning.

I hate paywalls. I want to read that paper. I know I'll understand the fine points of about 25% of the paper, as I have no training. But I'd love to try.

The work is being done by serious people. I travelled in Gabon with one of the people who had revised Cichlids in western and central Africa, as well as an expert in barbs of the region. These people have huge experience and great knowledge, as well as access to tools and resources we don't. They've spent most of their lives working on understanding the evolutionary relationships between all these fish. They're really trying to understand the diversity out there.

DNA testing for fish has been going on since before 2015 in Australia so presumably it's available elsewhere in the world, especially now (2024).

When I cloned and DNA sequenced my first gene in the 1980s, it took me several weeks and cost my grant several thousand dollars. By the end of my career we could sequence DNA in a matter of days, the cost was less than $100 and the technology became so user-friendly that even undergraduate students Could perform the procedure without a lot of training. Given the low cost and ease of performing the procedure, there is no reason why within a decade Most of our hobby fish can be classified appropriately based on their DNA similarities or differences.

I understand why & it's nice they have better IDs. But darn! How will I ever learn all the new names?

Cass, at least your tetra's new name is shorter & easier to spell, lol

fishorama said:

I understand why & it's nice they have better IDs. But darn! How will I ever learn all the new names?

Cass, at least your tetra's new name is shorter & easier to spell, lol

Click to expand...

Lol not so much for my bentosi or heraldschultzi they got changed too haha new name is longer

Well, there's that...but an awesome close up pic of your formerly named tetra

I save 1 letter on one species, and 3 or 4 on another.

I'm sure most of that paper talks of methods and formulas I lack the training to understand, and frankly, that I lack the interest to learn. But the results expressed in plainer English are always interesting in scientific papers. I may not know how chemical ABC works with substance DEF, but what that process shows is neat.

All these fish, as species, are little pieces of a puzzle we're assembling blind. Well, at least I'm blind. The people who did this research have a better picture. Tetra is one of those words that are only really convenience - there are so many different things under the banner. My African 'tetras' (Alestids, Distochoidids) aren't really 'tetras', but their connection to their South American cousins is neat to ponder. They're ancient stories.

All these genus names tell a story of links and changes. To me, it's the greatest story not quite understood well enough yet to be properly told. We're getting there.