Tor malabaricus

Range and habitat

This mahseer is confined to the west-flowing rivers and streams of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Tor malabaricus, the Malabar mahseer, is a fish, a species of mahseer native to southwestern India.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet

It may be expected that Tor malabaricus has similarities with all other mahseer species, being omnivorous, with a diet that likely includes aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates, fruit and vegetation, small amphibians and other fish. It would seem probable that adult fish access headwaters for spawning during high water conditions, although as it inhabits the faster, shorter rivers draining westwards along the Western Ghats, migrations would likely be shorter than other species.

In crisis

This species is currently assigned as Endangered by the IUCN. As with other mahseer species, the main threats are: loss of habitat due to urbanisation, encroachment on flood plains, dam building, sand extraction and pollution. Destructive fishing methods like dynamite, poisoning and electricity are in common use throughout South and Southeast Asia, and may be expected to be a major threat to the sustainability of populations.

In many of the rivers that have, historically, held Tor malabaricus, an emerging threat is deliberate stocking of the mahseer species from Maharastra, Tor khudree.

Tor malabaricus 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 Tor malabaricus, Wikidata item Q6397555. 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.