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- The *ICLARM Quarterly
Vol.
23, No. 4 (October - December 2000)
Features
Biodiversity
of Estuarine Fish Faunas in West Africa
E.
Baran
Abstract
In
West Africa (between Ivory Coast and Sénégal),
estuarine environments vary from lagoons to high
discharge rivers to inverse hypersaline estuaries.
This results in a high diversity of estuarine
fish species, with an important turnover and a
core of ubiquitous species. The species richness
of a given estuary depends on the combination
of hydrological factors (marine or freshwater
dominance) and biogeography (continental biogeographic
regions). The catch rate is higher in lagoons
and inverse estuaries than in normal estuaries
,which can be explained by the predominance of
small juveniles in the latter. Clupeids are the
most abundant fishes all over the region, but
different systems have different dominant species.
Assessing the functioning of West-African estuaries
provides useful comparisons to Asian estuarine
systems.
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