New Zealand Freshwater Fishes an Historical and Ecological Biogeogra
This book provides a synthesis of taxonomic and ecological information on New Zealand’s freshwater fish fauna. New Zealand has been isolated in the southwestern Pacific Ocean since it separated from Gondwana during the Cretaceous period, some 80 million y
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FISH & FISHERIES SERIES VOLUME 32 Series Editor: David L.G. Noakes, Fisheries & Wildlife Department, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA
For other titles published in this series, go to www.springer.com/series/5973
R.M. McDowall
New Zealand Freshwater Fishes An Historical and Ecological Biogeography
R.M. McDowall National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Christchurch New Zealand [email protected]
ISBN 978-90-481-9270-0 e-ISBN 978-90-481-9271-7 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9271-7 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931388 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Zealandia, a substantial ancient continent that is now evident as a series of emergent islands, of which New Caledonia and New Zealand are much the largest, these and other small islands being connected by various submerged rises and plateaus (GNZ Science, Wellington, N Z)
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Preface
In many ways, this book is the culmination of more than four decades of my exploration of the taxonomy, biogeography and ecology of New Zealand’s quite small freshwater fish fauna. I began this firstly as a fisheries ecologist with the New Zealand Marine Department (then responsible for the nation’s fisheries research and management), and then with my PhD at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA in the early–mid 1960s. Since then, employed by a series of agencies that have successively been assigned a role in fisheries research in New Zealand, I have been able to explore very widely the natural history of that fauna. Studies of the fishes of other warm to cold temperate southern lands have followed, particularly southern Australia, New Caledonia, Patagonian South America, the Falkland Islands, and South Africa and, in many ways, have provided the rather broader context within which the New Zealand fauna is embedded in terms of geography, phylogeny, and evolutionary history, and knowing this context makes the patterns within New Zealand all the clearer. An additional stream in these studies, in substantial measure driven by the behavioural ecology of these fishes round the Southern Hemisphere, has been exploration of the role of diadromy (regular migrations between marine and freshwater biomes) in fisheries ecology and biogeography, and eventually of diadromous fishes worldwide. In part this interest was stimulated by my discovery in the 1960s of the role of diadromy in the New Zealand fauna. This work was enhanced by discussions of the phenomenon with American Geo
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