© Zoological Institute, St.Petersburg, 2004 Contribution to taxonomy and nomenclature of freshwater fishes of the Amur drainage area and the Far East (Pisces, Osteichthyes) A.M. Naseka & N.G. Bogutskaya Naseka, A.M. & Bogutskaya, N.G. 2004. Contribution to taxonomy and nomenclature of freshwater fishes of the Amur drainage area and the Far East (Pisces, Osteichthyes). Zoosys- tematica Rossica, 12(2), 2003: 279-290. Based on reexamination of original descriptions, type materials, comparative material, and a wide literature the present data on nomenclature and taxonomy of several taxa of freshwater fishes important because of a big deal of uncertainty connected with their identification and/or status are critically analysed. Discussed are Macropodus ocellatus, Acanthorhodeus, A. asmussii, A. macropterus, Rhodeus amurensis, Cyprinus rubrofus- cus, Parabotia mantchurica, Lefua, L. costata, L. pleskei, Pelteobagrus, P. mica, P. ar- gentivittatus, Pseudobagrus, P. ussuriensis, P. herzensteini. A.M. Naseka, N.G. Bogutskaya, Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Uni- versitetskaya nab. 1, St.Petersburg 199034, Russia. E-mail:
[email protected] Introduction The present-day interest to Amur and Far East freshwater fishes has been obviously motivated For almost 100 years, the publications by Berg by several main reasons. The first one is that a (1909, 1914, 1916, 1949, etc.) and Nikolsky (1956) considerable discrepancy has been revealed in a have been the manual for several generations of number of taxonomic opinions in the recent Chi- Russian ichthyologists on the fish fauna of Amur nese and Japanese literature when compared to and other Far East river systems. An annotated that published in Russia. The second reason is checklist of cyclostomata and fishes of the con- wide using of molecular methods that offered a tinental waters of Russia (Reshetnikov, 1998) and strong incentive for revision of polymorphic and an atlas (Reshetnikov, 2002a, 2002b) were re- taxonomically difficult groups.