Fishes of the Arataye River and Their Spatio-Temporal Organization

Abstract

Half a century ago, the scarcity of ichtyological studies in French Guiana was contrasting with the situation of the other countries of the Guyana shield. Indeed, in 1949 Puyo registered only 76 species of freshwater fishes in French Guiana though one century sooner Schomburgk (1841) already described 84 species in the rivers of Guyana and at the beginning of the twentieth century this number was raised to more than three hundred (Eigenmann 1912). It is also early in this century that the Surinam ichtyology spread out (Outboter 1993). So, when the various French institutes, INRA and National Museum of Natural History, and later IRD (ex ORSTOM) planned intensive ichtyological studies at the end of seventies, French Guiana ichtyology was far backward to that of the neighbouring countries. But two decades later, owing to several extensive works in the main rivers and coastal swamp (Keith 1997) and to many intensive inventories like the study on the Arataye (Boujard et al. 1990a,b), we can consider that delay was recovered and may be overtaken (Meunier et al. 1999). Effectively, checklists and dichotomic keys (Le Bail et al. 1984, 2000, Rojas-Beltran 1984, Planquette et al. 1996, Boujard et al. 1997, Keith et al. 2000) are now available and various biological studies have been conducted (Boujard et al. 1988, Loir et al. 1989a, b, Renno et al. 1989, 1990, Pascal et al. 1994, Hostache et al. 1993, 1995, and others). Moreover, ecological studies on fish communities of coastal streams (Mérigoux et al. 1998), tributaries or ‘criques’ (Rojas-Beltran 1986) have been published. It should also be pointed out that several species have been identified as good models for the study of various biological phenomenons or for their high reactivity to water quality. Among other examples, can be cited Leporinus friderici used to study the role of neural crests in the ontogeny of scales (Zylberberg & Meunier 1996) and Apteronotus albifrons and its significant changes of electric signal characteristics in response to water pollution (Thomas et al. 1996a,b).