Endangered
Sardinella tawilis
Sardinella tawilis
Sardinella tawilis (the freshwater sardinella, freshwater herring, bombon sardine or freshwater sardine) is a freshwater sardine found exclusively in the Philippines.
Appearance
Like other members of their family, they have laterally compressed bodies with bellies covered in tough, scale-like scutes.
S. Tawilis is a small fish reaching up to 15 cm and weighing less than 30 g.
Range and habitat
S. Tawilis populations are only found in Taal Lake in the Batangas province on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Taal Lake is the third-largest lake in the Philippines and is located in the caldera of Taal Volcano. Near its center lies the 23.8-square-kilometer (9.2 sq mi) Volcano Island that has a 1.9-kilometer (1.2 mi) crater lake in the middle.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The freshwater sardinella prefers to ingest larger prey, such as adult copepods, supplemented with rotifers and water fleas. This suggests some partial control over prey selection exhibited by the fish, as opposed to simple filter-feeding.
It is known that the Taal population spawns during the months of April to July, when surface temperatures are highest.
In crisis
S. Tawilis is listed in the Ark of Taste international catalogue of endangered heritage foods of Philippine cuisine by the Slow Food movement. In January 2019, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared S. Tawilis an endangered species. Because of several factors, the species is threatened by overfishing.
As with all species consisting of a single population in one location, a local extinction event will lead to species extinction. As the population of the Philippines grows, the demand will be greater for tawilis, possibly overfishing the lake's stock population.
Sardinella tawilis 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 Sardinella tawilis, Wikidata item Q3753916. 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.
