Subterranean Fishes of the World

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

Country

Types

Holotype: USNM 204999 adult female (with ova) 58.3 mm SL. Paratypes ("paratopotypes" of Cooper and Kuehne 1974): USNM 204998 3 specimens; UMMZ 197679 2 specimens; ALA (UAIC in Cooper and Kuehne 1974) 3705 2 specimens, 31.2-48.4mm SL. One specimen reported to be in the collection of T.L. Poulson was never in fact received by him (T.L. Poulson pers. comm.) and the location of this specimen is not known. This is the type species by original designation and monotypy of the cave‑restricted genus Speoplatyrhinus.

Distribution

Alabama, USA.

Known only from the type locality: Key Cave, Lauderdale County, Alabama, USA (34^o51’N, 87^o40’W). Caves to the west of Key Cave, which may once have held populations, are now inundated after the creation of Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee River. Collier Cave (also known as Collier Slough Bone Cave) lies within the aquifer seen in Key Cave and may be potential site for this species though it has never been seen there. Bell Cave, Elbow Cave and Watkins Sink Cave are also candidates for additional populations (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 1985, 1990, Kuhajda and Mayden 2001). Typhlichthys subterraneus is also recorded from Key Cave (Steve Walsh pers. comm. and John Cooper pers. comm.).

Habitat

Key cave contains sections of deep clear water and several bat roosts. There is an abundant aquatic fauna of stygobitic crayfishes (Procambarus pecki and Cambarus jonesi), amphipods, and isopods and a dense terrestrial invertebrate fauna from the bat guano. The diet probably also includes copepods. Key Cave is an important site for the endangered Gray Bat, Myotis grisesens, and it is thought that the presence of the bats is of vital importance to the cave fishes as their guano will provide direct and indirect sources of food.

Systematics

This is the most troglomorphic of all amblyopsid fishes.

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

As above only.