Endangered
Mordacia praecox
Mordacia praecox
Mordacia praecox is an animal in the family Mordaciidae (order Petromyzontiformes), recorded as Endangered and tied to Australia.
Appearance
It has a thin eel-like body around 12 to 15 cm (4.7 to 5.9 in) long, with two low dorsal fins on the back half. The skin is dark blue above and grey below. Ammocoetes and juvenile adults are indistinguishable from those of M. Mordax, that also occurs within its distribution, but the adults are easily distinguished by their size and colouration.
Range and habitat
Mordacia praecox, the Australian brook lamprey or nonparasitic lamprey, is a freshwater species of southern topeyed lamprey that occurs in south-eastern Australia. For many years M. Praecox was known only known from the Moruya and Tuross rivers of southern New South Wales. It is believed to have become locally extinct from those rivers sometime between 1995 and 2003, but additional populations have been found in the Wallagaraugh River, that traverses the border between New South Wales and Victoria, and over 1000 km to the north in the Maroochy, Fraser Island and Water Park Creek river regions of Queensland.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
Two geographically isolated populations of non-parasitic Mordacia found in the Noosa river region of Queensland are believed to represent one or two closely related, but distinct, species that are yet to be described. Single specimens of Mordacia recorded from the Macleay and Richmond river regions of northern New South Wales suggest that further populations of Mordacia, most probably M. Praecox, remain undiscovered in those areas.
Mordacia praecox is 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 Mordacia praecox, Wikidata item Q2647293. 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.
