''Pelangia mbutaensis'' is a species of

rainbowfish Rainbowfishes are small, colourful freshwater fishes belonging to the Family (biology), family Melanotaeniidae, found in northern and eastern Australia, New Guinea (including islands in Cenderawasih Bay and Raja Ampat Islands in Indonesia), Sula ...

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found only in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also foun ...

to West Papua in

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

. This species was described by Gerald R. Allen in 1988 from

types Type may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc. * Data type, collection of values used for computations. * File type * TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file. * Ty ...

collected from the Lake Mbuta Basin which lies about 8 kilometers northwest of

Etna Bay Etna Bay (, ) is a bay in eastern Kaimana Regency, situated in the southeastern corner of West Papua (province), West Papua province, Indonesia. Teluk Etnaat

GeoNames.Org (cc-by) GeoNames (or GeoNames.org) is a user-editable geographical database available and accessible through various web services, under a Creative Commons attribution license. The project was founded in late 2005. The GeoNames dataset differs from, b ...

post updated 2012-01-17; database downloaded on 2015-11-27 Th ...

in West Papua. It is the only known member of its

genus Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family (taxonomy), family as used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In bino ...

, the name ''Pelangia'' is derived from the

Indonesian Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to: * Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia ** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago ** Indonesian ...

word for "rainbow" and the

specific name Specific name may refer to: * in Database management systems, a system-assigned name that is unique within a particular database In taxonomy, either of these two meanings, each with its own set of rules: * Specific name (botany), the two-part (bino ...

refers to the type locality, the swampy basin of Lake Mbuta.

References

Melanotaeniinae Freshwater fish of Western New Guinea Fish described in 1998 {{Atheriniformes-stub