Critically Endangered
Ayumodoki
Parabotia curtus
Ayumodoki is a loach in the family Cobitidae (order Cypriniformes) — Parabotia curtus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The kissing loach has an elongated body that is colored a deep dark brown dorsally with lighter brown vertical stripes extending down the sides.
Range and habitat
It is found in lakes and streams on Honshu, the largest island in Japan. Spawning grounds for kissing loach are ditches and small reservoirs for rice cultivation of a river system located in Japan. As adults, Ayumodoki migrate from these flooded paddy fields to fast moving, muddy streams and rivers like the Yodo River.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Ayumodoki only lay eggs once a year, and spawn in early summer in flooded areas like ditches or small reservoirs used to harvest rice. One of these spawning ground include paddy fields stemming from the Yoshii River in Okayama.
The kissing loach migrates to flooded areas, among them paddy field areas, for spawning in early summer and the spawning of this species is limited after the formation of flooded areas over terrestrial vegetation.
In crisis
Current conservation status on Ayumodoki is that it is listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as critically endangered. Land-use change and urbanization in Japan is expanding rapidly and is beginning to threaten important river ecosystems in Japan. In 2016, they decided that it was best to move the location to avoid the destruction of the few remaining natural loach habitats left in Japan.
Ayumodoki is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Ayumodoki, Wikidata item Q3272249. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
