Subterranean Fishes of the World

The common name is Ozark Cavefish (Page et al. 2013, Adams et al. 2020)

Country

Types

The accounts of Eigenmann (1898, 1899) make no mention of individual specimens, nor do they mention the number of animals available to him. The description is thus based on an unknown number of syntypes whose location is not known. The most important definition of the species is given by Woods and Inger (1957:245).

Distribution

Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, USA.

Type locality: Sarcoxie, Jasper County, Missouri, USA (37^o05’N, 94^o10’W) (?, see note below). Willis and Brown (1985) made a thorough search of known locations and found the species in only 13 caves of 180 examined. United States Fish and Wildlie Service (1989, 1996) records that this species is “presently” known from 21 caves. The distribution is limited to the Springfield Plateau of the Ozark Highlands Province in northwest Arkansas, northeast Oklahoma and southwest Missouri. This species is nowhere sympatric with Typhlichthys subterraneus as was previously thought (Jones and Taber 1985).

Mouser et al. (2023) record this specie from 83 locations within the Ozark Highlands ecoregion.

(Note: Willis and Brown (1985:311) state that this species "was first collected in Sarcoxie Cave, Jasper County, Missouri by Garman (1889)" and in their reference list give page 232 of this source. In fact no mention is made anywhere in Garman (1889) of this cave. Woods and Inger (1957:245) give the type locality as "Sarcoxie, Missouri" and in their list of the range say "Jasper County: caves in or near Sarcoxie (Days Cave, Downers Cave.....)". Willis and Brown (1985:315, Table 1) synonymise Days Cave and Downers Cave with Sarcoxie Cave. Whether the type locality really is "Sarcoxie Cave" or whether it is Days Cave or Downers Cave, or indeed some other cave "in or near Sarcoxie" is not known to me.)

Habitat

This species is usually found in small cave streams where there is an upwelling of groundwater from the underlying aquifer.

Systematics

A DNA study by Bergstrom, Noltie and Holtsford (1995, 1997, 1998) and Bergstrom (1997) suggests that all of the populations studied cluster together and that they lie some distance from any other populations of amblyopsids. These preliminary data indicate that rosae is a monophyletic clade with some considerable divergence within it.

Mouser et al. (2023) recorded this species from a new location: "Troglichthys (= Amblyopsis) rosae (Ozark Cavefish) is currently known from 83 locations within the Ozark Highlands ecoregion. We found a cavefish at a new location in the Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees on the western side of the Neosho River (Delaware County, OK), which is on the northwest periphery of the Ozark Cavefish range. Examination of the mitochondrial ND2 gene supports that the specimen is an Ozark Cavefish, but distinct (4.6–9.2% pairwise distance) from other specimens that have been genetically sampled, and could represent a unique population. Future research should focus on expanding sampling efforts and conducting a range-wide genetic analysis of the Ozark Cavefish" (from their Abstract).

There are nine known and named taxa in the Family Amblyopsidae. Of these six are subterranean fishes with the usual troglomorphic characters of reduced eyes and pigment and permanent subterranean existence, and three are epigean fishes with normal eyes and pigment. Recent molecular and morphological evidence produced by Hart et al. (2020) demonstrates that the relationship between these hypogean and epigean fishes is not simple. There are four major clades within the Family:

1. Typhlichthys subterraneus and Typhlichthys eigenmanni are sister species and sister to this pair is Speoplatyrhinus poulsoni.  However, T. subterraneus is quite clearly divided into two subgroups, one of which is closer to T. eigenmanni than it is to the other group of T. subterraneus. The only way to read the cladogram for this group is that it consists of three taxa, one of which is currently un-named. This clade are all subterranean fishes.

2. Two of the epigean fishes, Forbesichthys papilliferus and Forbesichthys agassizii, are sister to each other and their sister is the hypogean species Amblyopsis spelaea.

The two remaining clades contain one species each but their relationships to the other six species is ambiguous:

3a. Sister to the above groups is epigean Chologaster cornuta with hypogean Troglichthys rosae sister to all other taxa.

3b. Sister to the above groups is hypogean Troglichthys rosae with epigean Chologaster cornuta sister to all other taxa.

Given the fact that the distribution of Chologaster cornuta is very far from the distributions of the other taxa 3b seems the most parsimonious explanation. Amblyopsis hoosieri is not included in the paper of Hart et al. (in press) but one would expect it to be in group 2 above based on geography.

This analysis does not take into account the ten possible cryptic taxa, currently subsumed within Typhlichthys subterraneus, identified by Graening, Fenolio and Slay (2011), Niemiller et al. (2013) and Hart, Burress and Armbruster (2016).

Museum Holdings

KU 3210, 14007, 14169; OSUMZ 7105, 7106, 7271, 7848 (Tafanelli and Russell, 1972; Mayden and Cross, 1983; Moore, 1972); Also specimens at FMNH, MU, UMMZ, and USNM (Woods and Inger, 1957:245); BMNH.