Is the species endemic just to that wadi?
These wadis are geographically isolated from each other often by desert or just distance, so they’ve been isolated long enough that species can evolve separately. Very little work has been done in Arabia about the ecology of freshwater fish, their behaviour, what they’re eating and so on. I would imagine that if this wadi is linked to adjacent wadis, the fish will be found in other places, but I haven’t been back to the area since and we don’t know how widely distributed the species is. There’s a huge number of questions that we’ve still got to answer on Arabian freshwater fish. Would you say that Garra smarti is an attractive fish? To a fish scientist it’s very attractive, but maybe to most people… Well, it’s quite small. It only grows to a maximum of 2cm, the reason being that freshwater habitats in Arabia are very small – there’s not a lot of water and not much food around, so these wadis wouldn’t support any larger species of fish. For more information, see www.panda.org/uae.
