Indostomus

thumb|226x226px|Indostomus crocodilus, This living Specimen collected from a blackwater stream in Toh Daeng Peat swamp forest Narathiwat province, southern Thailand by Worakarn RUNGPRASERT, MD. Indostomus is a genus of small ray-finned fish native to slow-moving or stagnant freshwater habitats in Indochina. It is the sole genus of the monogeneric family Indostomidae, Long considered to be sticklebacks, within the order Gasterosteiformes, modern analyses place the indostomids within the order Synbranchiformes, which implies that they are related with the spiny eels and swamp eels.

==Taxonomy== Indostomus was first proposed as a genus in 1929 by the Indian zoologists Baini Prashad and Dev Dev Mukerji when they described Indostomus paradoxus, giving its type locality as north of the Indawgyi Lake near Nyaungbin in Upper Burma. They erected a new family, Indostomidae, for the genus. Indostomidae was classified within the order Gasterostiformes, specifically within the suborder Gasterosteoidei. Phylogenetics have, however, shown that Gasterostiformes was paraphyletic with the Gasterosteoidei not being sister to the Syngnathoidei and being more closely related to the Zoarcoidei, but that the inclusion of the Indostomidae in the Gasterosteoidei rendered that taxon paraphyletic. However, in the 5th edition of Fishes of the World, Indostomidae was still included in the Gasterosteoidei within the order Scorpaeniformes but other phylogenetic studies have classified the family within the monotypic suborder Indostomoidei within the order Synbranchiformes.