Evaluation of Fish Biodiversity of Eastern Ghats Region for Conservation and Sustainable Utilization

Abstract

India is one of the mega biodiversity hot spots contributing to the World’s biological resources from the long stretches of Eastern Ghats on the East, the greater Himalaya range on the Northern Plains and Western Ghats on the west. The Eastern Ghats range is unique in its own way to host many valuable flora and fauna from time immemorial. The Eastern Ghats are located between 77o 22’ and 85o20’ longitude and 11o30’ and 20o00’ N latitude(Fig.1). The Eastern Ghats, unlike the Western Ghats, are not a continuous range of mountains but a series of broken and weathered relicts of the Peninsular Plateau represented as a series of isolated hills and much of the Ghats is of lower altitude than Western Ghats. Beginning in North Orissa, they pass through the coastal region of Andhra Pradesh to Tamil Nadu cutting across Karnataka. Their average elevation is about 610 m. The Eastern Ghats are spread over four states from the Northeast to southwest along the east coast, covering an area of about 75,000 km with an average width of 200 km in the north and 100 km in the south (Bhairavamurthy, 1982). The average rainfall ranges from 1200 mm to 1500 mm, which is less than that in Western Ghats. The mean minimum temperature varies widely from 210 C and 26 0C (Dani 1982). Because of their lower elevation and their broken character, traversing across the Eastern Ghats is much easier.