Holy loach! Fish missing for decades rediscovered in Turkey’s Batman River

For about a decade, ichthyologist Cüneyt Kaya had made it a quest to search for the critically endangered Batman River loach (Paraschistura chrysicristinae), a tiny, orange-and-brown-striped freshwater fish once found in the Batman and Ambar rivers in Turkey. But no one had spotted the fish since 1974, leading to speculation that the species had gone extinct. But on Oct. 16, Kaya and his colleague, Münevver Oral, caught an unfamiliar fish in their net while on a research trip to look for another species in the upper Batman River in eastern Turkey. “We came out of the water and I remember he [K…

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