The Neotropics harbour the greatest diversity of freshwater fish on Earth. Despite recent advances in characterizing the fish fauna, the total number of species, distributional range, evolution and ecological traits remain uncertain. Thus, we quantify shortfalls in the knowledge of taxonomy (Linnean shortfall), geographic distribution (Wallacean shortfall), evolutionary relationships (Darwinian shortfall) and feeding habits (Raunkiæran shortfall) of Auchenipteridae driftwood catfishes, one of the most representative groups of the Siluriformes family in the Neotropics. We find a steep increase in the historical accumulation of valid species over time, suggesting that 45% of the total number predicted remains to be described. Auchenipterids also remain under‐collected; only 45% of the ecoregions and less than 3% of the one‐degree grid cells covering the Neotropics are reasonably sampled. The topologies of recent phylogenies are more similar to each other than former ones, showing a tendency towards a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for this family. Current knowledge on feeding habits is biased towards a few genera and species and is still expanding with every new published study. Our study highlights specific knowledge gaps that need to be addressed: a considerable number of Auchenipteridae species remain to be described; and most of valid species lack reliable information on their geographic distribution and feeding habitat. It implies that research on fish systematic biology needs to advance and it will require a concerted effort of taxonomists, ecologists and biogeographers to reduce these gaps.

中文翻译：

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量化对新热带金鱼科鱼类知识的不足

新热带地区拥有地球上最大的淡水鱼类多样性。尽管最近在表征鱼类动物群方面取得了进展，但物种总数，分布范围，进化和生态特征仍然不确定。因此，我们量化了Auschenipteridae浮木cat鱼的分类学知识（Linnean不足），地理分布（Wallacean不足），进化关系（Darwinian不足）和摄食习惯（Raunkiæran不足）方面的不足，这是Sil形目家族中最具代表性的群体之一在新热带地区。随着时间的推移，我们发现有效物种的历史积累量急剧增加，这表明仍有45％的预测总数尚待描述。棘金龙类动物的采集量仍然不足。合理地仅对45％的生态区域和不足3％的覆盖新近系的一度网格单元进行了采样。最近的系统发育的拓扑比以前的彼此更相似，显示出对该家族的系统发育假设的趋向。当前有关喂养习惯的知识偏向少数属和物种，并且随着每项新发表的研究的不断发展。我们的研究突出了需要解决的具体知识空白：仍有许多需要描述的金鱼科物种；大多数有效物种缺乏有关其地理分布和觅食栖息地的可靠信息。这意味着对鱼类系统生物学的研究需要进一步发展，这需要分类学家，生态学家和生物地理学家共同努力以减少这些差距。