Found in various types of habitat but shows a marked preference for shallow, slow-moving and standing waters such as rice paddies and other temporally-inundated environments with dense aquatic vegetation.

Type locality is given as ‘Cedawáti [Vedawati] stream, headwaters of Krishna River near Heriuru, Mysore, India’, with the species currently considered to occur throughout India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and probably Bhutan.

It’s also been recorded in Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka although some or all of these reports may refer to other species.

This species continues to be mislabelled as O. melastigma, a name currently considered invalid by the majority of recent workers, or O. javanicus, a valid but distinct taxon. Roberts (1998) demonstrated that MClelland’s description of Aplocheilus melastigmus, later renamed O. melastigma, does not correspond with any known Oryzias species from the Indian subcontinent or Myanmar since it’s said to have a dark spot in the dorsal-fin and an excessively slim body, among other anomalies.

X. cancila is often seen referred to as ‘freshwater garfish’, and although it does superficially resemble the true gars of the family Lepisosteidae, it’s actually a member of the Belonidae, or needlefishes, the majority of which are marine or estuarine in existence.

There are currently just two species in the genus although the probable existence of a third member has been noted by Roberts (1989) among oth…

D. polota is sometimes referred to as D. quadrifasciatus (Sevastianov, 1809) but the original name of the latter, Chaetodon quadrifasciatus Sevastianov, 1809, is a junior primary homonym of the older Chaetodon quadrifasciatus Bloch & Schneider 1801, thus Coius polota Hamilton, 1822 takes precedence.

This species is sometimes sold under the trade name of 'chameleon fish' due to its ability to rapidly change colour, especially when breeding or stressed. It was originally described as Labrus badis by Hamilton but Bleeker reclassified it as Badis buchanani in 1854; he had adopted the species name 'badis' as the new name for the genus and wished to avoid using a tautonym. At that time the use of tautonyms was avoided in zoological taxonomy but is now permissible under ICZN ru…