A new species of loricariid catfish from the genus Pareiorhina has been described by scientists.
Carine Chamon Arion Aranda and Paulo Buckup of the Department of Vertebrates at the National Museum in Rio De Janeiro described the new species of plec as Pareiorhina brachyrhycha in the journal Copeia.
The plec was found in the Ribeirao Grande and nearby drainages, on the left bank of the Rio Paraiba do Sul basin in Sao Paulo in the far south east of Brazil.
There are two other described species in the genus at the moment: P. rudolphi (Miranda-Ribeiro, 1911) and P. carrancas, which was described by Bockmann and Ribeiro in Icthyological Exploration of Freshwaters in 2003.
The new species lives alongside P. rudolphi and is believed to be a close relative. The two can be told apart by the lack of azygous dorsal plates above the caudal peduncle on brachyrhyncha, which are present in P. rudolphi.
For more information see the paper: Chamon, C., Aranda, A. and P. Buckup (2005) - Pareiorhina brachyrhyncha (Loricariidae: Siluriformes): a New Species of Fish from the Paraba do Sul Slope of Serra da Mantiqueira, Southeastern Brazil. Copeia: Vol. 2005, No. 3, pp. 550-558.