
The binni (Mesopotamichthys sharpeyi) is a species of cyprinid fish endemic to the Tigris–Euphrates Basin in the Middle East. This fish mostly inhabits lakes and marshes, especially in densely vegetated places where it also lays its eggs, but periodically it moves into rivers. This barbel is the only member in its genus, but was included in the "wastebasket genus" Barbus by earlier authors. It has declined in recent times due to habitat loss and overfishing.
SPECIES
via GBIF
The binni (Mesopotamichthys sharpeyi) is a species of cyprinid fish endemic to the Tigris–Euphrates Basin in the Middle East. This fish mostly inhabits lakes and marshes, especially in densely vegetated places where it also lays its eggs, but periodically it moves into rivers. This barbel is the only member in its genus, but was included in the "wastebasket genus" Barbus by earlier authors. It has declined in recent times due to habitat loss and overfishing.
The binni is an elongate fish but is deep-bodied for a barbel. It is overall brownish–golden with a lighter belly and darker fins. It can reach up to in total length, and in weight. The sexes are similar, but females reach a larger size. The sex ratio tends to be skewed with more males than females. Maturity is reached when the species is two to four years old, and the species can reach an age of up to nine years. It feeds almost entirely on plants, ranging from phytoplankton and algae to higher plants. Although the remains of tiny animals have been found in their stomachs, these are probably ingested by mistake when feeding on plants.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).