Scardinius erythrophthalmus (Linnaeus, 1758)

Iftime, Alexandru & Oţel, Vasile, 2025, An annotated systematical checklist of the Romanian ichthyofauna, Zootaxa 5654 (1), pp. 1-64 : 17

Scardinius erythrophthalmus (Linnaeus, 1758)

A native, widespread fresh- and brackish-water species, living in slow-flowing or stagnant water (including the Razim lagoon), in both intra- and extra-Carpathian drainages ( Bănărescu 1964; Oțel 2007; Cocan & MireȘan 2018; Năstase et al. 2022; Nagy et al. 2023).

Scardinius racovitzai Müller, 1958 , a native, endemic putative species of thermal freshwaters, formerly found in the “Ochiul Țiganului” pond on the Pețea (Peța) thermal-fed rivulet in Bihor ( Bănărescu 1964 [as S. erythrophthalmus racovitzai ]; Bănărescu 2002; Bănărescu 2005; Kottelat & Freyhof 2007; Cocan & MireȘan 2018), is nowadays extinct in the wild as the pond dried following thermal water overexploitation, but maintained and propagated in captivity ( Müller et al. 2018). Scardinius racovitzai is less constrained by high temperature than previously believed (GrigoraȘ et al. 2015), and “doesn’t form its own separate clade” in a nuclear- and mtDNA-informed phyletic analysis ( Popescu et al. 2017), and it overlaps in all defining morphological features with S. erythrophthalmus (see Bănărescu 1964, Kottelat & Freyhof 2007 and, e.g., Szlachciak & Strachowska 2010 for such features in both species), and is likely a thermal-adapted population of S. erythrophthalmus ( Müller et al. 2018) .