Going, going, gone...

Stop the presses!! University of Washington ichthyologists contest Paedocypris' status as the smallest known vertebrate! But there's more than one way to measure a tiny fish, as Siva's review of the literature shows.

An individual who was involved with Dr. Tan Heok Hui's team has posted a personal update on the last known habitat of Paedocypris in West Malaysia:

I was supposed to study the behaviour of Paedocypris for my Research project in NUS.

JANUARY 2005
I visited North Selangor Peat Swamp (NSPSF) with Dr Tan in January 2005 to collect this fish. We visited all the sites that the fish had been previously collected. We could not catch a single fish. On top of that, of other peat swamp species, we caught fewer fish species than previous collections in NSPSF.

This may have been because of two reason, 1) The fish is seasonal, 2) North Selangor was in the process of being drained for agriculture, the disturbance may have caused the species to go extinct.

JULY 2005
I visited these same sites in July 2005. By this time the swamp was in worse condition. The streams were all nearly dry and overgrown with vegetation, we sampled here and again found no Paedocypris, and found even fewer fish species than we had in January.

OVERVIEW
50 species of fish have been collected from North Selangor Peat swamp forest (NSPSF), 20 of which can only survive in the acid water conditions of peat swamp forests, and a further 5 species restricted to NSPSF.

Paedocypris sp.
Betta livida
Betta hipposideros
Parosphromenus harveyi
Encheloclarias curtisoma

North Selangor is nearly completely dry, in the process of being logged and converted to agriculture. If not alreay extinct, Paedocypris and the other 4 species listed above are safely on the way to extinction....

Comments

[monkey]

:(
*cries*
fucking developers :@:@:@:@:@:@:@:@:@
*angry monkey jumps up and down doing war cries*

[Hai~Ren]

NOOOOOOOOOOOO...

Damn, just as I was about to do a post on Paedocypris, now I have to talk about this angler fish as well...

Can we have a new category? World's smallest non-parasitic fish. =/

[monkey]

they already differentiated the two as world's smallest freshwater vs world's smallest marine fish

[ivan]

Pure penal envy I guess. That fish has got some big balls though.