A critique on taxonomic studies on inland water fishes of Iran in the last two decades

A long with development of science in the last two decades, science of fish Taxonomy has been accompanied with great development. By employing new methods of taxonomical studies in fish such as molecular studies, new and important results were obtained in fish classification, which sometimes were adversative and, in some cases, confirm and complement the previous results. In one of the first studies on Iranian inland water fish Abdoli (2000), the number of Iranian inland water fishes was considered to be 140, in the following Esmaeili et al. (2010) about 202 species, Jouladeh Roudbar et al. (2015) about 257 species, Abdoli (2015) about 170 species, Keyvani et al. (1395) about 163 species, Esmaeili et al. (2017) about 288 species, and Esmaeili et al. (2018) reported about 297 species. As well is recognizable from the results, the exact number of inland water fishes of Iran is not clear, for example, in comparison between the study by Keyvani et al. (1395) and Esmaeili et al. (2017), in spite of close interval of two studies with each other, about 125 species, disagreement can be seen that is very high and controversial. Of course, it is obvious that since 2000, by the use of morphological and molecular methods about 60 species have been formally described and introduced and the presence of new species in Iran has been reported for the first time. But it seems that some descriptions and first reports have been ignored by some researchers. Therefore in this study, the precise review of these studies, weaknesses and strengths of each one will be carefully considered to determine that what is the exact number of Iranian inland water fish