PICTICHROMIS DINAR: A NEW SPECIES

Dr. John Randall and Karen Schultz have made it official - Pictichromis dinar is a new species from Western Sulawesi. While it looks very similar to a couple of other dottybacks in this genus (see this post for more information and photos), they have concluded, through the use of DNA analysis, that it is indeed distinct. But can you tell the difference from external characteristics alone? Good question. Apparently, the new species (seen above),

Here is the actual abstract from the paper on the fish:

"A new pseudochromid fish species, Pictichromis dinar, is described from five specimens from the western side of the Gulf of Tomini, Sulawesi, Indonesia, where it occurred on a drop-off in 15 to 25 m. It is bright purple anteriorly and abruptly bright yellow posteriorly in life, hence remarkably similar to P. paccagnellae (range from Bali and Sulawesi to Vanuatu), and to P. coralensis (range from Queensland to New Caledonia). The demarcation of purple and yellow is generally more anterior and more slanting in P. dinar. The caudal fin of P. paccagnellae and P. coralensis varies from slightly rounded to slightly emarginate, compared to distinctly emarginate in P. dinar, the caudal concavity is 9.9-11.2% SL. Also, P. dinar has modally one more gill raker. Thirty specimens of Pictichromis dinar and 28 of Pictichromis paccagnellae were assessed at 628 base pairs of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I gene. No haplotypes are shared between the species, and within species sequence divergence (d = 0.003) is an order of magnitude lower than sequence divergence between the two species d = 0.06). This is consistent with reproductive isolation and species-level designation. "

Randall, J. E. and J. K. Schultz. 2009. Pictichromis dinar, a new dottyback (Perciformes: Pseudochromidae) from Indonesia. Aqua, Int. J. of Ichthyol. 15 (4):169-176