Consider the following pairs:
| Wildlife | Naturally found in | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Blue-finned Mahseer | Cauvery River |
| 2. | Irrawaddy Dolphin | Chambal River |
| 3. | Rusty-spotted Cat | Eastern Ghats |
Which of the pairs given above are correctly matched?
Answer & explanation
Answer: (c) 1 and 3 only
Why not the tempting option · UPSC's key is (c). Pair 1 holds on the reading 'lives wild in the Cauvery': the blue-finned mahseer is now the river's dominant mahseer and breeds there. Strictly it is not native to the Cauvery, since peer-reviewed work shows it was stocked from a Maharashtra hatchery from the 1970s–80s and the river's own mahseer is the hump-backed Tor remadevii; but no option offers '3 only', and with pair 2 clearly wrong, (c) is the only answer the options allow. In the exam, when one pair is contestable on fine taxonomy, let the options decide.
UPSC's key accepts pairs 1 and 3 and rejects pair 2. The blue-finned mahseer is the mahseer most often found in the Cauvery today, where it breeds in the wild; the Irrawaddy dolphin's Indian stronghold is Chilika Lagoon, not the Chambal; and the Rusty-spotted Cat does occur in the Eastern Ghats.
- ✓ 1. The blue-finned mahseer (Tor khudree, the Deccan mahseer) is now the common mahseer of the Cauvery: a self-sustaining wild population, which a 2015 study of the river's angler catches found to be recruiting strongly, after decades of stocking by Karnataka's fisheries department and angling bodies.
- ✗ 2. Chilika Lagoon on the east coast is the largest habitat of the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin in India. The Chambal is known for the gharial and the Ganges river dolphin, not this species.
- ✓ 3. The Rusty-spotted Cat lives in forests of peninsular India, including the Eastern Ghats; it has been recorded on camera in Papikonda National Park in the northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh.
Remember · Irrawaddy dolphin: Chilika Lagoon (Odisha). Rusty-spotted Cat: peninsular forests including the Eastern Ghats. Blue-finned mahseer: the common mahseer of the Cauvery today.
Sources
- Chilika Development Authority (Government of Odisha): Chilika Lagoon ↗ · reference work “Hot spot of biodiversity with 228 species of Bird, 335 species of Fish and largest group of endangered Irrawaddy dolphin habitat”
- Journal of Threatened Taxa 12(10), 2020: length-weight relationships of two mahseers (Tor) of the river Cauvery, Karnataka ↗ · reference work “these are the first available LW relationships for the Critically Endangered Tor remadevii and the non-native and locally invasive Tor khudree”
- Journal of Threatened Taxa 8(5), 2016: camera-trap records of Rusty-spotted Cat from Papikonda National Park, northern Eastern Ghats ↗ · reference work “The present note reports the first camera trap records of the Leopard Cat Prionailurus benghalensis Kerr, 1792 and Rusty Spotted Cat, Prionailurus rubiginosus Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1831 from the Papikonda National Park, situated in the northern Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh.”
- Pinder et al. (2018), PLoS ONE: taxonomy of the hump-backed mahseer, open-access copy on PubMed Central (NIH) ↗ “Currently known to be endemic and restricted to the River Cauvery basin in the Western Ghats, T . remadevii is distinguished from congener”
- Pinder, Raghavan & Britton (2015), Endangered Species Research 28: the hump-backed mahseer of India's River Cauvery, open-access copy in the Bournemouth University repository ↗ · reference work “evidence suggests that the hump-backed phenotype is endemic to the river, whereas the blue-finned phenotype was introduced in the 1980s … with further documentation that stocking activity on the Cauvery included 30 000 mahseer by the Fish Farmers Development Agency, Mysore”
Question and answer: UPSC's official GS Paper I (2019, Series A) — paper ↗ · answer key ↗. Explanation: Minimalist IAS, checked 1 Oct 2026 (how we verify). ·