Rutilus Explained

Rutilus is a genus of fish in the family Cyprinidae found in Eurasia. This genus is a widely distributed lineage of cyprinids and ranges from West Europe to East Siberia.

Species

In FishBase (2022), nine species are included in the genus:

• Rutilus caspicus (Yakovlev, 1870) (Caspian roach)
• Rutilus frisii (Nordmann, 1840) (Black sea roach)
• Rutilus heckelii (Nordmann, 1840)
• Rutilus kutum (S. N. Kamensky, 1901) (Caspian kutum)
• Rutilus meidingeri (Heckel, 1851)
• Rutilus pigus (Lacépède, 1803) (Pigo)
• Rutilus rutilus (Linnaeus, 1758) (Common roach)
• Rutilus stoumboudae Bianco & Ketmaier, 2014
• Rutilus virgo (Heckel, 1852) (Cactus roach)

In a phylogeographic study, Levin et al. (2017) argue that the Ponto-Caspian taxa including R. caspicus, R. heckelii and R. stoumboudae could represent a single widespread species whose range extends to Siberia, to be named Rutilus lacustris, whereas R. kutum is included in R. frisii. ^[1]

The genera Leucos and Sarmarutilus have been recently separated from Rutilus and are closely related to it.^[2]

Notes and References

1. Levin, B.A., Simonov, E.P., Ermakov, O.A., Levina, M.A., Interesova, E.A., Kovalchuk, O.M., Malinina, Y.A., Mamilov, N.S., Mustafayev, N.J., Pilin, D.V., Pozdeev, I.V., Prostakov, N.I., Roubenyan, H.R., Titov, S.V. & Vekhov, D.A. (2017): Phylogeny and phylogeography of the roaches, genus Rutilus (Cyprinidae), at the Eastern part of its range as inferred from mtDNA analysis. Hydrobiologia, 788 (1): 33–46.
2. Bianco, P.G., Ketmaier, V. (2014). A revision of the Rutilus complex from Mediterranean Europe with description of a new genus, Sarmarutilus, and a new species, Rutilus stoumboudae (Teleostei: Cyprinidae). Zootaxa, 3841 (3): 379–402.