Phoxinus phoxinus
species of fish
Phoxinus phoxinus (known colloquially as the Eurasian minnow, minnow, Channel minnow, or common minnow) is a species of freshwater ray-finned fish belonging to the family Leuciscidae, which includes the daces, minnows and related fishes. It is the type species of genus Phoxinus. This taxon was formerly considered to be the only species in the genus Phoxinus found in Europe and to have a wide geographic range in Eurasia, however, it is now regarded as part of a species complex with new species being described across its former range and this species being restricted to Western Europe. It occurs predominantly in cool (12–20 °C (54–68 °F)) streams and well-oxygenated lakes and ponds. It is noted for being a gregarious species, shoaling in large numbers.
Taxonomy
Phoxinus phoxinus was first formally described as Cyprinus phoxinus by Carl Linnaeus in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae published in 1758 with its type locality given as the River Agger north of Lohmar at 50°50'N, 7°12'E, in Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany. In 1820 the French polymath and naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque proposed the genus Phoxinus, although he placed no species there but this species is the type species by absolute tautonymy. In 2007 Maurice Kottelat published a paper on the variation in populations of what were thought to be "common minnows" Ph. phoxinus sensu lato and revealed that what had been thought to be a single widespread Palearctic species was, in fact, a species complex. This species is classified within the genus Phoxinus, the Eurasian minnows, within the monotypic subfamily Phoxininae of the family Leuciscidae.
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This entry incorporates text from “Phoxinus phoxinus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.