How many Cichlid species are there?

[cichla]

How many Cichlid species are there?
Eschmeyer & Fong (1) count all the valid cichlid species. They counted 1606 (end of 2011). The graphic below (2) shows the development (until 2009) of the taxonomic exploration.
Greetings, IS

(1)Eschmeyer & Fong (2011) Pisces. In: Zhang, Z.-Q. (Ed.) Animal biodiversity: An outline of higher-level classification and survey of taxonomic richness. Zootaxa 3148: 26–38.
(2)Wie viele Cichlidenarten gibt es? DCG-Informationen 41 (7): 163–165.

[Bas Pels]

obviously, this only counts the described species - but to me, the number is surprisingly low

I woulkd have guessed more or less the double:
Lake Malawi ~800
Lake Tanganyica ~600
Lake Victoria (incl recently extinct species due to lates) ~600
rest of Africa ~400
South America ~400
Central & North America 100
Madegascar ~20
India 3
rest of Asia (that is, middle east) 3

total ~3000 - of which 2000 in the Great Lakes

[Mark Smith]

I would think your Lake Tanganyika estimate is way too high. Described and undescribed known species is somewhere around 260. It is hard to see how over 300 have yet to be discovered (as much as I would love to see that happen!).

[Bas Pels]

For the lakes, the numbers are what I remember reading once. I'm not that interested in them, therefore I can not say whether the numbers are correct

But still - the other numbers are more or less what everyone expects, right?

[Bojan Dolenc]

We have been discussing about this already here about 2 years ago:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9682&p=53881#p53881
About link: http://www.eol.org/pages/5344
On Fri Oct 08, 2010

From the Cichlid Room Companion catalogue: "This catalogue of cichlids, lists today 1,642 generally accepted described and 563 potentially undescribed species". We also list 444 available names in synonymy. The number of described valid species should have an error margin of 1% at the most. The undescribed species error margin nobody knows. But it is safe to say we have about 2,200 cichlid species. We also have listed 234 generally accepted valid cichlid genera.

http://www.cichlidae.com/gallery/default.php