Nemateleotris Exquisita
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''Nemateleotris exquisita'' is a species of
dartfish Dartfishes are a group of fish, formerly considered to be a subfamily, Ptereleotrinae, of goby-like fishes in the family Microdesmidae of the order Gobiiformes, Authorities now consider the species in the family Microdesmidae are within the Gobi ...
which was described in 2013 from specimens collected in the
Red Sea The Red Sea is a sea inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. Its connection to the ocean is in the south, through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. To its north lie the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and th ...
, off Mauritius and
Kwa-Zulu Natal KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN) is a Provinces of South Africa, province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the government merged the Zulu people, Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu language, Zulu) and ...
, South Africa. Formerly, the elegant firefish (''Nemateleotris decora'') was thought to be found in the western Indian Ocean but ''N. exquisita'' was found to be larger, with a more slender body and longer snout, as well as the having a shorter first spine on the first
dorsal fin A dorsal fin is a fin on the back of most marine and freshwater vertebrates. Dorsal fins have evolved independently several times through convergent evolution adapting to marine environments, so the fins are not all homologous. They are found ...
. They also differ in colour with this species being yellow in the anterior part of the body and this colour extends further towards the tail than the analogous coloured area on ''N. decora''. A hybrid ''N. decora'' x ''esquisita'' is thought to have been photographed in the Maldives in 1988, while the
IUCN The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. Founded in 1948, IUCN has become the global authority on the status ...
states that further taxonomic research is required to ascertain the validity of ''N. exquisita''.


References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q21309539 exquisita Fish described in 2013 Taxa named by John Ernest Randall