Gerald R. Allen and Mohammed Adrim (2003) Coral Reef Fishes of Indonesia. Zoological Studies 42(1): 1- 72. The Indonesian Archipelago has an extensive history of ichthyological exploration dating back to visits by the French vessels L

Astrolabe (1826). Thanks largely to the exhaustive works of Pieter Bleeker(1819-1878), an extensive knowledge of Indonesian fishes existed at the beginning of the last century. Weber and de Beaufort continued to build on this foundation in their landmark publication Fishes of the Indo-Australian Archipelago, published in 11 volumes between 1911 and 1962. By the time the last volume was published, it was evident that the East Indian region and Indonesia in particular was endowed with the world s richest coral reef fauna. Although this claim has been confirmed by recent studies of several families and genera, there has been no comprehensive study of the Indonesian reef fish fauna in recent times. The present work, which includes a checklist, provides a detailed analysis. The current reef fauna con-sists of 2057 species belonging to 113 families. The 10 most-speciose groups, which account for approximate-ly 56 % of the fauna, are the Gobiidae (272 species), Labridae (178), Pomacentridae (152), Apogonidae (114), Blenniidae (107), Serranidae (102), Muraenidae (61), Syngnathidae (61), Chaetodontidae (59), and Lutjanidae (43). A zoogeographic analysis reveals that the majority (about 39%) of species are widely distributed either in the Indo-West Pacific or Indo-West and central Pacific, 23 % are primarily distributed in the western and central Pacific, 15 % (excluding endemics) range across the Indo-Australian Archipelago or portions of this region, 5