BLUE SPINEY EEL (Macrognathus aculeatus bangka) *DWARF SPECIES*

The small spiny eel Macrognathus aculeatus – the species rarely grows to 20 cm long, even though 38 cm is given as the maximum length in the literature – is one of the longest known species of these bizarre fishes. Already in 1786 it was described by Bloch. As so often with old known species there are exactly therefore a lot of misidentifications in the literature, because the origin was only vaguely known to Bloch; he gives “East India”, which corresponded at that time to the Moluccas, the Indonesian island world and the peninsula Malacca. In this area there are several Macrognathus species similar to each other. Therefore Kottelat and Widjanarti limited the origin to Java in 2005 and established a neotype from there as future reference.