A checklist of the fishes of southern Taiwan, northern South China Sea

Abstract

After Randall & Lim (2000) compiled a checklist of 3,365 species of marine fi shes from the South China Sea (SCS), it was expected that there would be an increase of many new species or new records, especially the deep-sea fi shes, in this region. In this paper, we went through the Fish Database of Taiwan and sorted a total of 38 orders, 230 families and 2,133 species that occurred in the southwestern Taiwan waters and SCS and have either voucher specimen, underwater photos or citations. Among them, 128 species belonging to 72 families are new records from Taiwan. In the checklist, 171 species occurred only in SCS, including 42 species only in Pratas Islands, 25 species only in Spratly Islands and 81 in other SCS areas; and 1,473 species occurred only in the southwestern inshore habitats of Taiwan. There are 317 new record species that were not included in the checklist of Randall & Lim (2000) and 45 species that are new addition to the fi sh fauna of SCS.