What are our sources for catfish located in the Egombé River?

[bekateen]

Hi All,

We have

Synodontis robertsi

and

Parauchenoglanis balayi

enterered in our database as being present in the Egombé river in Gabon. In the Bodies of Water table, the Egombé is a small location with no latitude/longitude data. Okay, that's fine but on a bigger picture I can't find any scientific validation for either of these species in anywhere named Egombé. As I update the

Parauchenoglanis

species and attempt to put in bodies of water, I fell upon this challenge.

Besides checking https://www.gbif.org/, I also checked https://www.idigbio.org/portal/search, http://portal.vertnet.org/search, http://www.fishnet2.net/search.aspx, and https://freshwaterfishdata-dev.ird.fr/geography. I found nothing. I also searched Google scholar for any results mentioning the Egombé (or Egombe) and either Synodontis or Parauchenoglanis, and I obtained no hits.

Since these are the only two species assigned to the Egombé (and I'm not convinced they should be), and since the Egombé is so small it has no coordinates (thus it plots on Google maps out in the ocean), why do we have the Egombé as a listing?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers, Eric

[Silurus]

My sources give Egombé as a stream with the coordinates 0°57'24"S 9°1'34"E.

[bekateen]

My sources give Egombé as a stream with the coordinates 0°57'24"S 9°1'34"E.

Thanks HH!

Yes, that's what I found also when I looked up its coordinates.

But that wasn't my main question. My question was about what's the basis for putting these fish in the Egombé? I can't find any literature documentation for either species there, nor can I find any references to them in the Egombé in the PCF forums.

Cheers,
Eric

[Jools]

This would have been input by @MatsP or Birger. It could be a mistake for Ogôoué but I think, looking at it, it appears to be bad data. I can't check book sources ATM but I'd go to Seegers and Poll to check if I could.

Cheers,

Jools

[bekateen]

A follow up to this thread: I found another source mentioning the Egombe as a body of water. It is linked to a fishing app, FISHBOX: https://fishboxapp.com/spot/gabon/ogooue-maritime-province/egombe-900442. The website shows a map image with a slightly different location for the pin (approximately 0°58'53.7"S 9°1'32.2"E / -0.981574, 9.025619), but if you click on "Directions", you get the same latitude and longitude as we have above, but with an added decimal place of precision. 0°57'24.7"S, 9°1'34.4"E (-0.95686,9.02621). Also weird about the map, I think the displayed pin is inaccurate, because if you zoom in on the page by simply magnifying the display of the entire page in Chrome (I didn't find a way to simply zoom only the map), then the pin shifts from this first location towards - but not quite reaching - the location we have recorded, the same as the location the website gives you if you click "directions." I presume that's just a fluke of the display.

Also, as I pursue this, I suspect that the placement of

Synodontis robertsi

in the Egombe is an error on our part. The type locality is "Elombe," a tiny village and ferry crossing on the Lukenie River in modern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Google Maps does not label Elombe, but the map function used by GBIF does, with approximate coordinates of -2.807, 18.242; if you put that set of coordinates in Google Maps, it drops the pin right on a tiny village along the river's edge, which is consistent with a ferry crossing. All other museum specimens I see online for S. robertsi are from this specific area, with no specimens recorded along the coast in the area we expect for the "Egombe." For now, for lack of better information on why the Egombe is included for S. robertsi, I'm going to remove Egombe as an occurrence. If needed, we can always reinstate that later.

Cheers, Eric

[Jools]

Sounds like good detective work to me! Almost certainly an old error.

Cheers,

Jools