Tor tor

Tor tor, commonly known as the tor mahseer, tor barb, or red-finned mahseer, is a species of cyprinid fish found in fast-flowing rivers and streams with rocky bottoms in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Pakistan. It is a commercially important food and game fish. In the Himalayan rivers, the population is rapidly declining through its native range, including some evidence of catastrophic population collapse, due to pollution, overfishing, the effects of dam building, climate change and introductions of other mahseer species. Until the 1980s, Tor tor was the most populous of the Himalayan mahseers in those rivers where robust species diversity monitoring had taken place. In 2011, the Madhya Pradesh government declared Tor tor as the official state fish of the state. There are also declining populations in rivers of Central India, including north-flowing tributaries of the Ganges/Yamuna basin, the Narmada basin and as far south as the Savitri River in Maharashtra. Given the huge differences in climatic and riverine conditions, careful work on species identity is needed to establish if these mahseer are also Tor tor, or an undescribed species.