ИСТИНА

Despite decades of study of Russian ichthyologists, the diversity of marine fishes of Russia is still poorly understood. The main reports on marine fishes of the USSR, compiled earlier for several basins (Schmidt, 1940; Andriashev, 1954; Lindberg et al., 1959, 1965, 1969, 1975, 1987, 1993, 1997; Svetovidov, 1964; Rass, 1987; Andriashev &Chernova, 1994) incompletely consistent with current knowledge on taxonomy and nomenclature of fishes and also include species common in these basins outside Russian waters in their present boundaries. The same defects are peculiar to some later compilations (for example, Boretz, 2000) whereas most other recent reports relate only to restricted regional faunas (Fedorov & Parin 1998, Sheiko & Fedorov 2000, Chereshnev et al. 200, Novikov et al. 2002, Fedorov et al. 2003, etc.). The project to create a recent catalog of marine fishes of Russia has been started 10 years ago. Since that time, annotated lists of species for all groups of marine fishes from Russian waters and adjacent countries has been published (Parin, 2001, 2003; Parin et al., 2002; Evseenko, 2003; Vasil'eva, 2003; Fedorov, 2004). These papers included lists of species (with the main synonymy) founded in 12 boundary seas, as well as in the 200-mile economic zone of the Russian Federation in the Pacific Ocean up to 2000-2003 yrs. In total, they represented 1153 species from 170 families. Further, this list was significantly expanded by later reports on new findings of a number of species not previously founded in Russian waters and data on new taxa described. But given the potential findings of other fishes from the border with the Russian economic zone waters the number of species could reach more than 1,320. The proposed statement provides a generalized description of the taxonomic composition of marine fishes of Russia and discusses the diversity of major fish groups.