Review of the literature on the biology of Tasmanian native freshwater fish.

Although Tasmania posesses a large amount of freshwater and a considerable variety of freshwater habitats it does not have a correspondingly large native freshwater fish fauna. The fauna is low in species number and also lacks diversity. Twenty five species are recognised in this work as native "freshwater" fishes. The term freshwater cannot be used too rigidly as many other species of fish may spend part of their life in freshwater ( water with salinity below 3p.p.t. is henceforth used to define freshwater). All of the fish included in the review with the possible exception of the whitebait, Lovettia sealii (Johnston) would appear to require or perhaps prefer freshwater for part or all of their life. Lovettia sealii has traditionally been included in works on freshwater fish in Tasmania and it is therefore included with that group in this work. Of the 25 species, 18 are of the order Salmoniformes, suborder Galaxioidei (McDowal3. 1969) and no less than 10 are of the genus Galaxias. The remaining 7 species are spread through 3 orders as follows: Petromyzoniformes (2 species), Anguilliformes (2 species) and Perciformes (3 species). The fauna shows an amazing radiation in the galaxiid group but suprisingly little activity elsewhere. In fact all of the 13 species endemic to the State are galaxioid fishes. However there has been little study of any detail done in Tasmania on any of the native freshwater fishes. The only exception to this is the work by Blackburn (1950) on L. sealii. With the exception of some brief, scattered details on some species all knowledge of the Tasmanian native fishes is a result of work done elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand. It is beyond the intended scope of this thesis to include a review of all the taxonomic work on the native freshwater fish of Tasmania as this would be as voluminous as the biological data. The treatment of the taxonomic data will be in the form of a species list as seen at the present time with a separate synonomy giving names and first user only for each species, then a brief coverage of the major taxonomic changes that have occurred since the original description of each species. The literature search relied heavily on the extensive reference lists in many papers by McDowall ( in particular: 1964a, 1968b, 1970c, 1971a, 1972a, b, 1976c) and in the papers directly relating to the Tasmanian fauna by Frankenberg (1974) and Andrews (1976)