A checklist of fishes of Telangana State , India

A checklist of freshwater fishes of Telangana State, India including accepted common name, vernacular name, IUCN status, and endemicity is presented.  Freshwater fish diversity of Telangana State is represented by 143 species belonging to 14 orders and 34 families.  Two species, Rita bakalu and Indoreonectes telanganaensis are endemic to Telangana State.

Studies on the freshwater fish diversity of Telengana State dates back to late 19 th century (Day 1876). This was followed by the work of Das (1924Das ( , 1944 who presented and published accounts of fishes in Hyderabad in the proceedings of the Indian Science Congress, and later by Rahimullah & Das (1935, 1936 in 12 th volume of Bulletin de la Société Portugaise des Sciences Naturelles. Comprehensive research on fishes of the erstwhile Hyderabad State was initiated by Rahimullah (1943aRahimullah ( ,b, 1944 and Mahmood & Rahimullah (1947). Other significant literature on the fishes of Godavari and Krishna river basins in the erstwhile Hyderabad State, Madras Presidency, and united Andhra Pradesh include those by David (1963a,b), Jhingran (1983), Rao & Reddy (1984), Talwar & Jhingran (1991a,b), Menon (1999Menon ( , 2004, and Jayaram (1981Jayaram ( , 1995Jayaram ( , 1999Jayaram ( , 2010.
Freshwater fish diversity of united Andhra Pradesh was studied and documented by Barman (1993) who reported the occurrence of 158 species belonging to 68 genera in 27 families and 10 orders. Later, Barman (2003) reported 39 species belonging to 26 genera, 12 families, and five orders occurring in the Koil Sagar, Mahabubnagar District. Chandrasekhar (2004) reported 65 species belonging to 36 genera spread over 13 families and five orders from tanks, lakes, and reservoirs in Hyderabad and environs. Recently, Rao et al. (2010Rao et al. ( , 2011 reported 24 species of fish belonging to 12 families and six orders from Pocharam Lake, and 22 species under 11 families and six orders from Wyra Lake, respectively. Over the last few years, several new species of fish were described from this region. This includes a new species of bagrid catfish Rita bakalu from Pranahita River ) and a new species of hillstream loach Indoreonectes telanganaensis (Prasad et al. 2020b). Prasad & Srinivasulu (2019a,b) provided new records of fishes from Telangana State, while Shyamsundar et al. (2017) and Prasad et al. (2020a) reported the checklist of freshwater fish fauna in the Udayasamudram and Manjeera reservoirs, respectively.
In recent years, numerous research papers in conference proceedings, theses, and predatory journals have been published on fish diversity of various lakes, reservoirs and rivers of Telengana State. Attempts have also been made to provide a comprehensive list of fishes known to occur in water bodies in Telangana State, including two such compilations by Srivastava et al. (2017), and Khartade et al. (2019).

Methods
For the present checklist, we researched and critically analysed all published (both peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed) literature and also relied on field surveys conducted since 2010 in various parts of Telangana State. We have also provided explanation for deletion of the taxa earlier recorded in literarture, and appeal to future workers to collect voucher specimens to report additions to the fish diversity of Telangana State.

Raghavan & Ali (2011a)
Mystus malabaricus (Jerdon, 1849) This species is endemic to Western Ghats, known from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Karnataka Abraham ( www.threatenedtaxa.org The Journal of Threatened Taxa (JoTT) is dedicated to building evidence for conservation globally by publishing peer-reviewed articles online every month at a reasonably rapid rate at www.threatenedtaxa.org. All articles published in JoTT are registered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise mentioned. JoTT allows allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and distribution of articles in any medium by providing adequate credit to the author(s) and the source of publication.

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