Category Archives: Travel

Northern glowlights

My kitchen window

Winter in Sweden, and that means darkness, cold, and snow covering all and everything. No wonder every window is lit, day and night, with glowing stars, moons, snowflakes, menorahs, or the new fashion little reindeer or bears lit by led from inside. Without all those warming winter lights darkness would bend our backs, and we would get swept away by depression. Or maybe not.

Nevertheless, I would like to take this window view to remind myself of another northern glowlight, recently named Dano flagrans. It is a little fish from warmer waters. From where it hails, however, you can actually view the snow of the eastern outcrops of the Himalayas. It is certainly the most septentrional of the Myanmar Danio, but rivalled, apparently defeated in northerliness by Danio dangila which occurs in the Brahmaputra basin in India up to the Dibru River. No other species of Danio reaches so far north.

Looking norwest from Putao

The scientific history of Danio flagrans begins in 1988, when I, in the company of Ralf Britz and our guide Thein Win arrived in Putao, the northernmost major city in Myanmar. Putao is close to the Chinese and Indian borders, on hills forming the headwaters of the Mali Hka, major tributary of the Ayeyarwaddy River which then runs through Myanmar as one big muddy aorta. Up in the Mali Hka, however, the water is clear, at least in the dry season, not very deep, and the river beds paved with stones and rocks. The fish fauna of northern Myanmar mountain streams is little known. Transportation in the area is relatively complicated, and a lot remains to be done up there in terms of ichthyological exploration.

Mali Hka in Putao

Back to our story, our little team was quartered in the military camp and we immediately set out to fish, having only two full days at disposal. The Mali Hka itself was too big for fishing, although alright for sightseeing, but around the regiment there were several small streams with low water and convenient for seine and handnets. The streams were shallow, the water was clear, rather cool, and fish were plenty. Here we found Badis pyema which was promptly described already in 2002, and Puntius tiantian in 2005, but other fish have lasted longer to be worked up. Walking along one of the streams, we switched direction to follow a tickle of water, almost no water, coming down the left bank hill, and in there were little skittish fish, almost invisible against the beige earth and seen only as moving shadows. A number of them, certainly Danio choprae – such was the field identification – came into formalin and one made it to a tube of alcohol. Neither Ralf nor I was into danios at the time, so the fish we just hoped would be useful for Fang, and we went on happily, catching Badis pyema and similar fish that had more of our attention those days.

Fresh collected northern glowlight danio, Putao 1998

One of the Putao danios was photographed but this was in times of film photography, with no immediate quality check, and much is to be regretted by the quality of the shot. Publishable it is not, but here it can be showed off as the first image ever taken of a Danio flagrans. The alcohol specimen was sequenced and appeared in a phylogenetic tree as Danio choprae (Fang et al., 2009), and by that time noone had looked at it closely (we had other specimens, true D. choprae for the morphological data). Time passed on. This was one species that Fang never worked on, but which obviously was somewhat different from the other samples of D. choprae, and I decided to give it a go in the Spring of 2012. The manuscript was already in hand as I again met Ralf in Belgium and we spoke about past achievements and plans for the future. As he had more of the danios from Putao from a later trip, and more D. choprae, he insisted that I include this material, and so it was. The paper had to be done from almost scratch but Ralf’s material certainly improved a lot on the description and conclusions. The description of Danio flagrans, the northern glowlight danio, eventually appeared in late 2012, 14 years after its discovery (Kullander, 2012). Incidentally, it is my first own danio paper, and it was fun to do. It was enjoyable in particular, because Danio flagrans and its sister species Danio choprae do not differ only in colour (in fact they are very similar in colours), but also present some very solid morphometric and meristic differences. I am otherwise much too used to cichlid species that differ by just some pigment spot. Danio flagrans has a shorter anal fin, with less fin-rays, and longer caudal peduncle compared to Danio choprae. Perhaps this relates to their environment. Danio choprae lives more to the south, near Myitkyina, and in warmer habitats; Danio flagrans in cool hillstreams. Beware that these species may not be correctly identified in the shops. Danio choprae, the glowlight danio may appear in the market as northern glowlights, a more expensive fish. I know, three of the false northerns are swimming in a tank in my garage. These changelings are beautiful fish decorated with orange stripes. Unfortunately, they never stay still, but are constantly on the move, and they move fast, so a good view of them remains an illusion of expectation. This brings me, by association, to the conclusion of this post: Besides lights in the windows, there is one more resource to overcome winter gloom. An aquarium with beautiful fishes (all fish are beautiful). Always something to see, to learn, to enjoy.

References

Fang, F., M. Norén, T.Y. Liao, M. Källersjö & S.O. Kullander. 2009. Molecular phylogenetic interrelationships of the South Asian cyprinid genera Danio, Devario and Microrasbora (Teleostei, Cyprinidae, Danioninae). Zoologica Scripta, 38: 237-256.

Kullander, S.O. 2012. Description of Danio flagrans, and redescription of D. choprae, two closely related species from the Ayeyarwaddy River drainage in northern Myanmar (Teleostei: Cyprinidae). Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters 23: 245-262. Open Access PDF from Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil.

Kullander, S.O. & R. Britz. 2002. Revision of the family Badidae (Teleostei: Perciformes), with description of a new genus and ten new species. Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters, 13: 295-372.

Kullander, S.O. & F. Fang. 2005. Two new species of Puntius from northern Myanmar (Teleostei: Cyprinidae). Copeia, 2005: 290-302. Open Access PDF.

Photos: Sven O Kullander, CC-BY-NC

Sirens of Liège

This is the first day of silence after coming back to Stockholm from the XIV European Ichthyological Congress in Liège, Belgium (3-8July).

Entrance to the museum and aquarium in Liège, venue of the XIV European Congress of Ichthyology, July 2012

Whereas the meeting, attended by a round 260 delegates from all over Europe and occasional from farther away, was well organised and quite informative, heat hit us and noise. Coming from a cold Swedish summer, the rainiest June in 200 years, Liègian temperatures were an amiable mid-20s and only one shower wet us. But it took buying a few more T-shirts (from Swedish H&M) to feel comfortably neat around the clock. I loved the heat, actually. But the noise… Constructed as an intricate labyrinth of narrow streets between stone and brick buildings, sounds from everything sounding cascaded through the streets of Liège and there was no escape even in the hotel room. Most remarkable, however, were the frequent ambulances and police cars continuously racing in and out of streets and alleys, with a 2000 db (exaggerating, but well …) high pitch sirens resounding all over the municipality. Quite remarkable. Liègians seem to love noise more than anything else.

Photo of stuffed mermaid in Liège museum

Sirena anthroposelacia pilifera in the exhibit of the Aquarium in Liège

Fleeing the street sirens I had a brief encounter with a real one in the lower floor of the combined public aquarium and zoological museum (Liège Aquarium-Museum) , which was also the venue for the Congress. This little lady had a glass cage all for herself, in swimming pose, and is indeed the first real stuffed mermaid I have come close to in real life.

Fish exhibit of the zoological museum in Liège

A part of the systematically ordered exhibit at the zoological Museum in Liège

The rest of the aquarium is maybe mainly for the local audience. The Museum, however, two floors up, was neat and had a number of interesting objects, making it well worth a visit. Displaying real animals in systematic order it was ideal and should be a lead star for other natural history exhibits.

Pages in notebook by Francis de Castelnau in the exhibition of the Zoological Museum in Liège

One table display featured a charming set of castelnauiana that was news to me, including drawing equipment, notebooks, and sketches from the later days of Francis de Castelnau (1810-1880). Apparently Castelnau donated specimens to the museum along with the notebooks, and there is now a plan to repaint the stuffed fishes based on the drawings.

The Congress? Well, I probably sat more than the usual number of sessions. Belgium has a big advantage in having several institutions providing training and research opportunities in morphology and anatomy, making it an interesting breeding ground for evolutionary and functional analyses of fish physionomies and behaviour, and has also a very strong research in African freshwater fishes. This balanced very well a large number of more or less conclusive or inconclusive molecular presentations. I travelled with NRM FishBase staff Michael Norén and Bodil Kajrup who presented a talk on our ongoing hagfish research, and a poster of a mapping of Swedish fish type localities, respectively. I have been too occupied with other things recently, and did not feel like giving a talk. Some other time. Maybe on mermaids. This is not the last mermaid post. It didn’t turn out a meeting report, at least.

By the way: The European Ichthyological Congresses are organised locally (this one mainly by the University of Liège) but are actually a significant part of activities of the European Ichthyological Society. The first congress was organised in Sarajevo in 1972. I was one of the organisers of the Congress in Stockholm in 1985. Membership in the society is open for all, and there is a website (http://artedi.nrm.se/eis/) providing the details how to join.

All photos © Sven O Kullander, CC-NC-BY

Mosioatunga, the true story

Dr Livingstone I presume is the archetype of an explorer for most of us. The helmeted man at the head of the line of bearers fearlessly plunging into thick jungles to discover the world untouched by man. That is the way they write their histories, and that makes for the books that sell. Of course, most of us now realize that wherever Livingstone and his likes went, there was already a human population. In East Africa at the time, there was both the native population, and considerable numbers of Arabian businessmen to show the way to all the discoveries the British needed. And help finding lost explorers from time to time. The fact is probably that the major contribution of western explorers was the mapping of the continents. During the 18th and 19th Centuries maps were drawn like never before, and it was new maps, not one more round of Europe encircled by the edge of the world.

Victoria Falls Photo John Walker, Public domain

The Center for the History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is the guardian of enormous archives of objects, maps, drawings, and manuscripts that will eventually help toward understanding how our knowledge of the world gradually developed over the last few Centuries. The Center is highlighting some of its material as “object of the month”, since a few months back. One of these objects is a map sent to the Academy by Charles Andersson in 1852. It is a map made by Oswell and Livingstone based on interviews with local informants. Interestingly, this map of southern Africa from 1852 shows the Victoria Falls. The falls that, legend has it, Livingstone discovered in 1855. Not, he already had a map. The local name of the falls is now rendered as Mosi-oa-Tunya, on the old map they appear as Mosioatunga.

And who was Charles Andersson, by the way? Some may be familiar with Oreochromis andersonii. That is the fish named after him, but somehow, the author, Castelnau, misspelt the name by dropping one of the ses in Andersson. Karl Johan Andersson, Swedish,born 1827 in the county of Värmland, was the son of the English hunter and writer Llewellyn Lloyd and a Swedish girl, Caisa Andersdotter. Lloyd spent most of his adult life in Värmland hunting bears and writing about it. Karl studied Zoology at Lund University and learned taxidermy at the natural history museum in Göteborg. He somehow got the idea of going to the Africa, and stranded already in London he became a friend of a distant relative, Francis Galton, yes the very one who discovered the fingerprinting technique. Galton and Andersson went to Africa, and Andersson spent the rest of his life as a trader, hunter, collector and more in what is now Namibia and South Africa, and much of that time in the field. Andersson was not an ichthyologist. He did collect a lot of birds. Not less than 2523 bird specimens from him are in museum collections (Dean, Sandwidth & Milton, 2006). He sent 200 or more specimens to the Gothenburg museum in 1864, but the curator there didn’t bother to open the boxes. Andersson wrote a classical travel book, Lake Ngami, published 1856, based on travels including to Lake Ngami (already ‘discovered’ by Livingstone). His second travel book, Okavango River, from 1861, relates his own major discovery, the river of the same name. Or … did he discover it?

Andersson’s zoological magnum opus, Notes on the birds of Damaraland, was published posthumously by John Henry Guerney in 1872. Andersson died of dysentery and physical wounds in 1867 on his way back from a failed expedition to the Cunene River on the border between Angola and Namibia. Andersson’s life is full of misery, hardships, diseases, fights with employees and local chiefs, and the one drawback after the other. The most disappointing must have been the search for Lake Ngami, only to find it already found. It is a miracle he survived so long. His companion Axel W. Eriksson (1846-1901), also Swedish, carried on the zoological collection and brought a huge collection of southern African birds to to Vänersborgs Museum in Western Sweden (available in an online database with images, all in Swedish).

The consensus (remember the map above) must be that there is (and was) nothing to discover on this planet, really. That is why science is not so much about discovery. It is about exploration and communication. Showing what the world is like, drawing the maps and fitting the pieces together. Also, life can be much easier than that of Karl Johan Andersson.

Reference

Bjelfvenstam, B. 1994. Charles John Andersson. Upptäckare Jägare Krigare. Carlssons Bokförlag, Stockholm, 253 pp.

Day 1, 2011

As the snow whirls around and the cold fills up the atmosphere, the new year brings a welcome day off to be taken care of. Dough is rising and breakfast bread will be served in an hour or so. Family is sleeping, stoned by the unusual late hours to sit through the paradox of a year and decade shift without anything really happening. Only computers worldwide automatically shifting display date, steadfast from Australia westwards. It takes 24 hours to shift from one day to another, or does it?

The past autumn proved hectic to the limit of sustainability and blogging plummeted, so there is something to be caught up on. Most of last year wasn’t in the plus column, however, so there is a lot to be expected from this one. The highlights of the past twelve months that come to mind spontaneously were:

The FishBase Symposium 2010 in Stockholm, October 18, featuring a fantastic series of talks by highly successful, competent and enthusiastic personality scientists covering all of what it takes to be a fish systematist, not least the field work and the need for specimens, not only tissue samples to do systematics, Melanie Stiassny, Maurice Kottelat, Tan Heok Hui, Richard Pyle, Jörg Freyhof, Anthony Gill, moderated by one more star, Ralf Britz. The audicence enjoyed the show tremendeously, and so did I. There is a report to download, most of it in Swedish, but there is always Google Translate.

Te Yu Liao’s PhD dissertation defence with Paul Skelton as opponent, 18 November. Te Yu has been with us at NRM since 2006 working on a revision of Rasbora and similar fishes. It has resulted in several phylogenetic studies, and several morepapers, altogether seven publications, included in the dissertation (A phylogenetic analysis of the rasborins (Cyprinidae: Danioninae: Rasborini)) but still to be published. These papers provide a new framework for danionine systematics and are based on both morphology and molecules. Some of the papers are:

Fang, F., M. Norén, T.Y. Liao, M. Källersjö & S.O. Kullander. 2009. Molecular phylogenetic interrelationships of the South Asian cyprinid genera Danio, Devario and Microrasbora (Teleostei, Cyprinidae, Danioninae). Zoologica Scripta, 38: 237-256.
Liao, T.Y., S.O. Kullander & F. Fang. 2010. Phylogenetic analysis of the genus Rasbora (Teleostei: Cyprinidae). Zoologica Scripta, 39:155-176.
Pramod, P.K., F. Fang, K. Rema Devi, T.-Y. Liao, T.J. Indra, K.S. Jameela Beevi & S.O. Kullander. 2010. Betadevario ramachandrani, a new danionine genus and species from the Western Ghats of India (Teleostei: Cyprinidae: Danioninae). Zootaxa, 2519: 31-47.

Peter Cottle’s book about danios (Danios and Devarios) came out in December, and made a great holiday gift. The title of the foreword (which I wrote …) summarises the opus: Passion. I will get back to this book and others, but suspecting the edition may be somewhat limited, I would recommend you to get your copy now …

What is up now:

There will be more danionine papers, several already in press

A long series of cichlid papers are in an advanced state, both on African and South American cichlids

FishBase will organise three meetings this year: the annual FishBase Minisymposium with the FishBase Consortium, the annual Swedish FishBase symposium, and triannual Artedi Lectures

The first volume about fish in The Encyclopedia of the Swedish Flora and Fauna series will be published in May or so. This volume covers all species of chordates occurring in Sweden from cephalochordates to chondrichthyans, authored by me, Thomas Stach (tunicates) and Henning Blom (introductions to chordates and vertebrates). The illustrations, however, may be the major reason to look forward to this book. They are all new, and all the Swedish fishes are superbly illustrated from scratch by Linda Nyman and Karl Jilg (I haven’t seen the tunicate illustrations).

And I will go to Iceland. All my life I strived to go south, to warmth, but my former student, Georg Friðriksson, who is now an ichthyologist with the Náttúruminjasafn Íslands, has assured me that Iceland is not covered with ice and snow in the summer (or has he? May have to ask again). They have fantastic fish, all kinds of ecophenotypes of char, but also sticklebacks.

As you can see, 2011 looks all bright, new, and worth living.

Danio year 2009: Rakhine Yoma

Stockholm area, Sweden, late December 2009

In the last few hours of the first decade of the 2000s, realising that my friends in the western Pacific time zones are already into the new decade, and writing this is not likely to come to an end this year. Snow and cold (-10 to -15C) outside demonstrate why tropical fish won’t do in the garden. It was night outside already at 1600h, but inside electricity glows in every corner and it is a comfortable +23C, so the fish inside are just fine.

In 1998, Ralf Britz and I travelled westward from Yangon in a battered but still comfortable Toyota minibus, with driver and guide. We did not have permission to fly to Kalaymyo to look for Badis ferrarisi (this was a Badis trip, and a considerable contribution to the Badis revision of 2002). Our substitute goal was the western slope of the Rakhine Yoma (aka Arakan Mountain Range), separated from the Ayeyarwaddy drainage and ichthyologically quite unknown. Of course Day had been there, up to Akyab (Sittwe), and Hora had reported fish from Sandoway (Thandwe), but nothing substantial was known. It took a whole day to travel the dirt roads and hitting Gwa on the Andaman Sea coast, arriving late in the evening. Of course we made a few stops on the way, but very brief.

Sampling sites in Rakhine Yoma in 1998.

The soft hills of Rakhine Yoma in a top view.

We then travelled north along the coast to Taunggok and returned to the Ayeyarwaddy at Pyay, making excursions up and down logging roads to find small streams with freshwater. The coastal stretch along the main road was either brackish water or no suitable water at all. Unfortunately, in the remaining four days, no badid came into the seine, so badids are probably absent from the area we sampled, betwen Gwa and Taunggok. That may be significant, or just due to poor sampling. We did get quite some interesting Garra, already described by me and Fang (2004), and quite some danios and other cyprinids endemic to the region. The Rakhine Yoma forests are actually a biodiversity hotspot with numerous endemic species of animals and plants, so no surprise endemic species of fish are also abundant. Endemic fish species that come to mind are Danio feegradei, Garra vittatula, G. rakhinica, G. flavatra, G. propulvinus, G. nigricollis, Puntius binduchitra, Batasio elongatus, Hara spinulus, Akysis vespertinus, and Channa pulchra.

Danio feegradei has already been described from Thandwe (then Sandoway) by Hora, who also reported Danio choprae from the same locality. The latter was first described from near Myitkyina in the upper Ayeyarwaddy drainage. The danionins we encountered, of course included D. feegradei, but also Hora’s choprae. The latter turned out to have very little in common with D. choprae and in fact to represent a new species. Along with it we were impressed by a huge danio that had two dark blotches on the side and inhabited small streams in the deep forest. This one nobody seems to have seen before, and the colour pattern was certainly not reported before.

Eventually these two new danios got their names. In 2009, 11 years and a bit more after we collected them. Why it takes so long time from discovery to description?

Danio aesculapii, preserved holotype.

The choprae-like fish was named Danio aesculapii, and with its 29 mm max SL in the wild is one tiny fish. The name was inspired by the popular name of snakeskin danio. In the living fish, not much of snake pattern shows, the most impressive in this highly agile being is a golden shine along the middle of the dorsum. In the preserved fish, however, there is a series of dark vertical bars anteriorly on the side and two rows of dark spots from above the anal-fin origin to the caudal-fin base. Unlike most Danio, D. aesculapii does not possess stripes on the caudal fin. The caudal peduncle is relatively deep, and has more scales, 12 around the middle, than most other Danio, which have 10 only. Asklepios or Aesculapius was the Ancient Greek god of medicine, typically equipped with a staff with a snake or two wrapped around it.

Devario xyrops. A male, just collected.

The large double-blotched species got named Devario xyrops with reference to the sharp ridges rising along the anterior part of the orbit (xyrops means razor-eye), and is also diagnosed by the colour pattern with a diffuse blotch formed by irregular vertical bars anteriorly on the side, and separated from a well-defined dark stripe on the posterior part of the body. It was getting dark, and we were exhausted after chasing fish up and down the stream all afternoon, but realising that this was an exceptional species, we made an effort to take a live colour photo as per above. The pink sheen ventrally probably derives from the red lid of the container on which the photo tank was placed, however. Devario xyrops is large for a danio, with the largest specimen 77 mm SL. Comparing with other Devario we found that the colour pattern is not fully unique. Also Devario browni has a separation of the lateral marking into an anterior blotch and a posterior band, but not as conspicuous as in D. xyrops. A similar species, D. anomalus, was described by Conway et al. (2009) from Bangladesh, and differs in being much more slender.

Small pool close to Thandwe, habitat of Danio aesculapii.

Habitat of Devario xyrops and Danio aesculapii north of Thandwe.

And with that pass the last day of 2009 and the first of 2010. It is still cold out there, and very dark. Not a very inspiring setting, but not all days are like this so I do dare wish you a productive 2010 full of excitement and happiness!

References

To learn more you can download the original descriptions of both Danio aesculapii and Devario xyrops which are available online as Open Access from the publisher’s website:

Kullander, S.O. & F. Fang. 2009. Danio aesculapii, a new species of danio from south-western Myanmar (Teleostei: Cyprinidae). Zootaxa, 2164: 41-48. [Errata: p. 46 line 3 from bottom: vittatula should be vittatula, add G. nigricollis]

Fang, F. & S.O. Kullander. 2009. Devario xyrops, a new species of danionine fish from south-western Myanmar (Teleostei: Cyprinidae). Zootaxa, 2164: 33-40.

And here are other papers mentioned (none of them Open Access):

Conway, K.W., R.L. Mayden & K.L. Tang. 2009. Devario anomalus, a new species of freshwater fish from Bangladesh (Ostariophysi: Cyprinidae). Zootaxa, 2136: 49-58.

Hora, S.L. 1937. Notes on fishes in the Indian Museum. XXXI. On a small collection of fish from Sandoway, Lower Burma. Records of the Indian Museum, 39: 323-331.

Kullander, S.O. & R. Britz. 2002. Revision of the family Badidae (Teleostei: Perciformes), with description of a new genus and ten new species. Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters, 13: 295-372.

Kullander, S.O. & F. Fang. 2004. Seven new species of Garra (Cyprinidae: Cyprininae) from the Rakhine Yoma, southern Myanmar. Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters, 15: 257-278.

Image credits:

Map from the NRM Ichthyology Collection online database, using Google Maps

All other images: Sven O Kullander, CC-BY-NC

Went fishing wrote book

Among the most tragic of events in this world and our times are the deforestation and destruction of the world’s tropical rain forests, along with the conversion of the entire Amazon basin into temporary cattle ranching and soy bean plantations, South East Asia into margarine palms to tickle the well-being of health fanatics. And along with that cultures, languages, animals, and plants of immense significance for humanity and the well-being of the planet. It is an unbelievable erosion of capital, and a straight road to future devastation for the concerned countries. Just like we now also experience the demise of the oceans, and the loss of most natural biodiversity rich habitats already happened in North America, Europe, northern Asia, and much of Africa.

Fortunately, we have the stories of those who were there, and the future will be able to sense from their writings the irrational passion of fish collection and jungle exploration, and at the same time the close encounter with the meaning of life.

Iténez – River of Hope (English edition 2009) is the story of Amanda Bleher (1910-1991), a middle age, newly divorced woman in Frankfurt/Main, in the 1950s, running a pet business, earning her considerable reputation not least for importing snakes and crocodiles, a female Indiana Jones as e-jardim has it. The story focuses on her travel to Brazil in search of the discus fish (Symphysodon). Attempting to bring an American car from Germany, laden with four kids, pets, and all sorts of belongings, not least cosmetics, it is a road story with a lesser local vehicle of considerable inconvenience. Of course, there are no discus where she goes, heading for the Rio Iténez (Guaporé) on the border between Brazil and Bolivia. Love, trust, money, belongings, and belief in humanity evaporate along the way. Reaching the old Jesuit mission Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade on the Iténez (Guaporé) River, there is considerable suffering in the tropical paradise, and with no money left, kids ill, and dubious friends failing, the dream of the Iténez has to be put back for realities for a while. Amanda eventually established a home and company near Rio, and travelled extensively afterwards, but this is the story you will want to read.

To a rational mind planning a field trip, these 277 pages of continuous impulsive re-planning on the way may be frustrating. Why is she taking the kids? Why this amount of cosmetics in the interior of Mato Grosso? Why not check out the taxonomic literature for Symphysodon localities (Amazon mainstream)? Why follow the one after the other jungle whacko so desperately? Nonetheless, this is a fascinating story of travelling in the rain forest in those days when there was forest in Mato Grosso. It is a woman’s story, and thus different from male itineraries. It does not obviously have a hero (or heroine), and it is very truthful of all those things that go wrong, all those decisions that were not so smart it turns out, that the other stories never tell. It is also a rare verdict of passion, for the animals, plants, the rain forest itself, and the search for a new existence far away from war-stricken Germany. Was Amanda Bleher a spy sent by the Germans to check out the almost-deserted Vila Bela as Brazilians at times seemed to think? Is this book her coded report back? Besides the elusive discus, Amanda Bleher was mainly interested in getting water plants for aquariums, and this book gives a vivid insight into the early days of exploration of the Amazon for aquarium fishes and plants.

Most of the history of exploration and travel is written by men. My bookshelves are laden with volumes by men discovering, exploring, and doing everything right. When I travel, it is never like that, it is always chaotic and frustrating all the time. The classical volumes of Ferreira, Humboldt and Bonpland, Castelnau, and Spix and von Martius, to mention the well-known, are faithful diaries, and there is much fact and information therein. But as literature they are boring.

There is one exceptional exception — Gordon MacCreagh’s (1886-1953) White Waters and Black (1926). It details about the Mulford Expedition 1921-1922, of six inexperienced scientists (Nathan E Pearson the ichthyologist) travelling from the highlands of Bolivia to Manaus and up the Rio Negro, with eight tons of luggage and no very clear mission. Well, the expeditioners as well as the luggage are reduced as the group proceeds, over two years’ time, and the bare truth and everything ridiculous and tragic is retold by the guide, MacCreagh, working under premises like this and worse:

The Minister of the Interior lays before me all his maps — wonderful charts showing a Yungas dotted with prosperous little towns. The Department of the Yungas, by the way, is the transandine sub-tropical and tropical jungle which, with the Department of the Beni, stretches away off to the far borders of Brazil.
“Who lives in these towns?” I ask the minister.
He is delightfully naïve about his ignorance. “Quien sabe? Perhaps Indians, perhaps fugitives from justice. At all events, they are people who pay no taxes.”
How, then, does he know that the towns are there?
He doesn’t. He shrugs with comical disgust and laughs.
“But, my good friend, I am not a maker of maps!”

I would not consider bringing 50 kg of oatmeal in glass jars on trail and river from La Paz to Manaus. But perhaps cooking pots, lanterns, if I bring an outboard motor I would make sure there were gasoline for it, and of course scientific equipment. In White Waters and Black, you can read more about what to take and not to take.

Women rarely go on expeditions, or they don’t write. Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz (1822-1907) was an early exception, documenting the Thayer expedition to the Amazon (186-1867) led by her husband Louis Agassiz, but it is also a relatively dry itinerary interspersed with exclamative footnotes by Louis Agassiz, A Journey in Brazil (1868).

Much more I appreciated Lady with a Spear (1951) by Eugenie Clark, an autobiography full of passion for collecting fish, part of the story of the post war atom bomb testing in the Marianas, and also testimony to the importance of having an aquarium in every home with children.

A remarkable early explorer, the British Mary Kingsley (1862-1900), made two trips to West Africa in the late 19th Century, at a time when Europeans had less chances of surviving the diseases there. She came back to England, and came back with fishes as well, and wrote a book. In the introduction to Travels in West Africa (1897) she wrote:

To Dr. Günther, of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful for the kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the specimens of natural history that I have been able to lay before him; the majority of which must have had very old tales to tell him. Yet his courtesy and attention gave me the thing a worker in any work most wants — the sense that the work was worth doing — and sent me back to work again with the knowledge that if these things interested a man like him, it was a more than sufficient reason for me to go on collecting them.

That is a very kind acknowledgment, and Mary must have been a very nice person, who also made headlines when defending Africans and African cultures against Christan demonisation. Mary collected fish in the Ogowe River, and has some species named after her in recognition of her contribution to ichthyology. She worked all alone and on her own expense. I find that remarkable, given the obvious hardships, the absence of cars, roads, airplanes, air-condition, and bottled water that present-day explorers make good use of. Travels in West Africa is old enough to be in the public domain and can be downloaded from various sources such as Google Books.

If you do not write down your story, it never happened.

All books here are available from Amazon and other Internet books shops, except Iténez – River of Hope, to be ordered from AquaPress. Image Sven Kullander, CC-BY-NC.

A day in Botany Bay

Botany Bay approximately where Solander, Banks and Cook first landed in 1770.
Photo: Sven O. Kullander. CC-BY-NC

Although claimed by the British, despite already being inhabited by other nations, to the outside world Australia was largely a Swedish discovery, by Daniel Solander (1733-1782), his boss Joseph Banks, and his captain James Cook, arriving to Botany Bay in 1770 for an eight day stop. That is when the last habitable continent on earth was finally incorporated in the world as we know it. Solander and Banks were essentially botanists, and did not mean anything to ichthyology, but anyway the terrestrial fauna and flora may be more special for Australia than the fishes, excepting then the remarkable Australian lungfish Neoceratodus forsteri discovered much later, described by Krefft in 1870, and the salamanderfish Lepidogalaxias salamandroides described as recently as 1961. Southern Australia, New Caledonia, and New Zealand should be marked for holding a group of fishes as interesting ever as the Araucaria trees, whose southern Gondwana distribution they track, namely the galaxiid fishes, with many species in this part of the world, and somewhat fewer in southern South America, and one in southern Africa.

Daniel Solander has a memorial by the shore of the first landing, erected by “countrymen” in 1914. I have to find out more details about this event. Because Solander lived all his professional life in Lindon, as a curator at the Natural History Museum, “countrymen” is ambiguous, but were likely Swedish.

Solander memorial, with plate. Photographed at wrong time of the day. Photo: Sven O Kullander. CC-BY-NC.

At the inlet to Botany Bay, the seaward sandstone extends into the Pacific as Cape Solander. That is where we today saw humpback whales blowing a little bit too far out to permit a good photograph. Cape Solander margins a whale sanctuary and there is a permanent whale observation post overlooking the sea at this point.

Cape Solander, NSW, Australia.
Photo: Sven O. Kullander. CC-BY-NC

It is good to make history, to discover, and to learn. Too often, however, in the era of colonisation this led to the demise or otherwise bad treatment of the local population, and damage to local fauna and flora by the introduction of exotic species, as happened to Australia. Australia today is of course well aware of all this, and has a large number of natural parks and active conservation programmes.

Fishes down under

The IPFC8 over, and number 9 probably located to Japan in 2011, it is soon time to bid farewell to Australia. Not much of fishes have we seen, but the Sydney Aquarium was interesting and had many fishes on exhibit both salt and fresh. I got my first closeup of a dugong, the real mermaid.

Mermaid: Dugong in Sydney Aquarium.
Photo Sven O. Kullander. CC-BY-NC

The local mall also had a nice assortment and tonight we dined on Macquairia maccullochi (hope I get this right because it is not easy to spell or remember) which was excellent. All the fish and chips and the fishburger in Pemberton were delicious but I am not sure what species is involved.

Barramundi, fish market in Sydney. Photo Sven O. Kullander, CC-BY-NC

Saturday and Sunday I was invited by Heiko Bleher, famous in the aquarium world for travelling everywhere in the world in search of interesting freshwater fishes, to come along on a trip to photograph Lepidogalaxias salamandroides.

We had a nice journey from Fremantle south, guided by a map with likely localities already marked. Lepidogalaxias salamandroides is a very special fish. It is the only fish that can turn its head in different directions, just like humans can move the head relative to the neck. In the fish, this is accomplished by an extended distance between the anterior vertebrae, providing room for muscle movements otherwise impeded by the relatively stiff normal fish vertebral column. It is confined to, but not uncommon in a relatively narrow stretch of coastline in southwestern Western Australia, and more precisely to swamp regions that dry out in the summer, and carry water only in the winter. The fish aestivates buried in the ground, and comes out only when it rains. Generally in is the only species in the pools where it is found, along with some freshwater crayfish.

And, yes, we were quite successful in finding the salamander fish, south of Northcliffe (population 200, in the middle of nowhere), where it was in all roadside pools, over white sand bottom, in clear, red-coloured water, with a typical vegetation I do not know to name. In one place we found it together with Galaxiella nigrostriata, which is also a small species, but probably not able to aestivate. Heiko will make available images and detailed information elsewhere, in the meantime enjoy the exclusive habitat of the species.

Habitat of Lepidogalaxias salamandroides near Northcliffe, Western Australia.
Photo Sven O. Kullander. CC-BY-NC

PS. No, it was Maccullochella macquariensis, locally called trout cod, difficult to spell in any case, and maybe should not have eaten because it is an endangered species, something I now have come to know.

At the 8th Indo-Pacific Fish Conference

The 8th Indo-Pacific Fish Conference is actually a gathering of people on a conference about fishes and not a gathering of Indo-Pacific fishes conferencing. At this meeting, in Fremantle, Western Australia, seemingly more ichthyologists than fish in the Swedish seas. It is a very well organised meeting, with excellent service and excellent setting in the Esplanade hotel which I am told has 4.5 stars. Yesterday’s buffet lunch, when 400 or more delegates suddenly swarmed out of the meeting rooms, was managed smoothly with engaged restaurant staff, several line-ups, and a rich selection of dishes. The lecture rooms are well equipped, and I sat a whole day experiencing every talk starting and stopping on time. All presentations are of outstanding professional quality.

Most talks concerned with taxonomy and ecology, here and at other meetings, include use of molecular sequencing as a method of investigation. This was not so five or so years ago, when molecular techniques were employed mainly for phylogenetic relationships. In the systematics talks one of the two IMPs (Improbable Molecular Phylogeny and Intriguing Morphological Phylogeny) form the basis of the presentation. Interestingly, non-taxonomists use molecular phylogenies to arrive at baselines for conservation or to check out some biogeographical patterns (phylogeography), but there is no real interest in checking against morphology or challenge previous systematic hypotheses. Very clear opportunities for deeper analysis tend to be left as-is, because the objectives of the research group are not systematic. After all, molecular phylogenies are supposed to make morphological work unnecessary, or ?. That is probably why morphological systematics has a better explanative platform (not necessarily better explanations, though). If morphological character transformations make sense, they provide better evolutionary explanations than non-lethal mutations in DNA sections that are only proxies for shifts in tokogenetic patterns. Morphological systematics tends to be more time consuming, however, with a steeper learning curve, and more dependence on expertise of a single individual scientist; and the resolving power at population levels remains doubtful for me – that is where systematics stops. I expect this morning’s plenary by Ralf Britz (him with the Dracula fish, again), followed by others in the Ontogeny and Systematics session, to inspire some fresh air into the perspectives for the neglected developmental approach to phylogenetic analysis. Or is it so neglected? In any case, the dialogue (which should be there) between more molecule oriented and more morphology oriented researcher is definitely a dialectic needed to carry systematics forward.

Now it is time to forage for breakfast.