Endangered
Tasmanian mudfish
Neochanna cleaveri
The Tasmanian mudfish is a small Australian amphidromous ray-finned fish in the family Galaxiidae.
Appearance
Typically galaxiid in form, scaleless, with an elongated, tubular body, and moderately sized mouth, it may be distinguished from other galaxiid species by the small eye and the blunt, rounded head shape with protruding tubular nostrils over the upper lip. The pelvic fins are small and set at about the midpoint of the fish's length, and the dorsal and anal fins are set right back with the dorsal fin slightly ahead of the anal. Caudal fins are rounded with well-developed flanges along the caudal peduncle reaching nearly to the posterior edges of the dorsal and anal fins.
Its length is up to 140 mm. Commonly it grows to 80 mm.
Range and habitat
Tasmanian mudfish is found in coastal wetlands of south eastern Australia: around Tasmania, Flinders Island in Bass Strait and southern Victoria particularly Wilsons Promontory. Isolated populations occur in the Otways, near Geelong and Melbourne in Victoria, as well as in far eastern South Australia near Naracoorte. The fish's range has been significantly reduced, especially in Victoria, due to destruction of suitable habitat through human activity such as swamp reclamation and drainage.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Spawning in late winter, the hatched larvae are washed out to sea, spending about 2 to 3 months at sea or in estuaries before returning to fresh water as part of the whitebait migration. The juvenile fish migrate upstream to their usual habitat.
Nocturnal in habit and secretive in nature, the fish usually rest during daylight in heavy vegetation or half buried in the muddy substrate.
In crisis
Tasmanian mudfish are not listed nationally as threatened due to their relative abundance in Tasmania. The fish is, even so, listed in Victoria as critically endangered under the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.
Tasmanian mudfish 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 Tasmanian mudfish, Wikidata item Q44509. 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.
