This species is traded under several names including ‘royal danio’, ‘blue-spotted hill trout’, and ‘blue-dotted mirror fish’.

It can be distinguished from congeners by possessing a single row of bluish-green spots along the length of the body, white margins on the dorsal and anal fins, 37-38+1 lateral line scales, and fleshy rudi…

At one locality in the Kalindhi drainage the water was clear, 1 m at its deepest point and flowing either side of a small check dam, below which the flow was stronger though still not particularly fast. The substrate was composed of rocks and cobbles with a thick layer of fine silt and sand above the dam. There were no aquatic plants but marginal grasses and shrubs were growing to the margins with some submerged roots protruding into the water.

Type locality is ‘Netravati River, Dharmasthala, Karnataka State, India’, with the species subsequently recorded from the Kabini (aka Kabani) River basin and it may be endemic to these two drainages.

While the Netraviti flows through Karnataka in its entirety before emptying into the Arabian Sea just south of the city of Mangalore, th…

This species may have appeared in the aquarium trade under the misapplied names Puntius arulius or P. tambraparniei in the past, both of which are also now classified within Dawkinsia. See the relevant profiles for D. arulius and D. tambraparniei for additional information regarding that confusion, since here we concentrate on D. rubrotinctus.

It was initially described by Jerdon in 1849 but placed in synonymy with P. arulius by Day (1878), where it remained for ov…

Confirmed localities include the Kabini, Bhadra and Moyar tributary systems where it was last collected in 1998, the 1980s and 1990-92, respectively.

The IUCN currently list it as Critically Endangered (possibly extinct).