by Prosanta
Chakrabarty and Matt Davis
May 2010
In late January to early February of this
year, my postdoc Matt Davis and
I traveled to Vietnam to collect some marine fishes from markets. Every year I
try to make a trip to Asia to collect rare fishes for the LSU fish collection
and for phylogenetic study. The large open markets of Asia allow us to collect
a diverse number of species in a relatively short amount of time. Instead of
hiring a trawler (upwards of $10K a day) it’s easier to hang out on the docks
to grab some freebies off the boats. Typically we collect early in the morning
and spend the rest of the day processing the fish (voucher, label, tissue
sample, preserve, etc.). Because of the great quantity of fish that we were
dealing with it really did take nearly the entire day to process the specimens
from each morning’s haul. On this trip we collected roughly 400 different
marine species and more than 2,000 specimens in two weeks. We also had a couple
of days to do some fresh/ brackish water collecting on the Mekong Delta. The
Mekong is one of the world’s oldest and oddest rivers and is home to car-sized
catfish, giant stingrays, and other behemoths of the fish world.
Vietnam
is a long narrow country that spans several biotic regions including the Mekong
Delta, South China Sea, and Gulf of Thailand. We saw long stretches of amazing
beaches, and miles of huge inland sand dunes directly abutting verdant green
rainforest. It is also culturally diverse. We saw signs of socialist pride (the
old Soviet hammer and sickle was ubiquitous) and French imperialism (baguettes
and wrought iron abound), mixed with an Indo-Thai- Chinese culture found
nowhere else. The people were extremely courteous and amiable, sometimes too
much so, making for a fun cultural experience. Matt in particular was gawked at
constantly for being a giant white man with funny colored straight hair.
Matt and I traveled with four Taiwanese
colleagues that had previous experience collecting in Vietnam. It was my first
time traveling in Asia without locals to help translate (as the Taiwanese spoke
no Vietnamese). This made for some funny and frustrating situations.
During
our trip we traveled to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and the beautiful beach
towns of Mui Ne and Nha Trang. The first two things that stood out about Ho Chi
Minh City included the amazing diversity of food and the incredible numbers of
scooters – the many, many scooters. These scooters zoomed past and parted
around you like a school of fish. For the most part there were no traffic
signals or even traffic patterns, just a free for all of scooters, taxis, and
buses. Many large cities in Asia have similar numbers of scooters on the
streets, but they all had some semblance of organization. Our Taiwanese colleagues,
who ride scooters in Taiwan quite often, would not rent scooters in Ho Chi
Minh, and often remarked how “they drive crazy here.” To cross a street in
Vietnam you have to walk deliberately into the non-stop flow of traffic keeping
a steady pace so that the traffic will move around you. Amazingly it works,
although I thought each time that I would be maimed. When we left Ho Chi Minh
we ended up on scooters ourselves to travel between fishing ports. Even in
these less populated areas weaving in-and-out of traffic and speeding on the
“wrong side” was still a common occurrence.
After a while you get used to it, and even I
went out on my own a few times with my little rented ”motobike” to relax and
blow the smell of fish out of my clothes.
The
markets we visited (more than 20 in all) were mostly small artisanal fisheries
from local fisherman collecting on the South China Sea. The fishes that we were
collecting were not always being sold at the market but were often part of the
rubbage pile of bycatch. As in most cases the bycatch piles are chock full of
strange fishes that no one would purchase for their dinner. It was in these
piles that we collected odd silvery eels, fatheaded jawfishes, fleshy dark
deepsea fishes, and numerous other oddities that we ichthyologists crave. The
markets themselves were also remarkably diverse matching the diets of the
locals. You know if the Vietnamese weren’t eating them that the fish must look
very strange.
Matt, who the Taiwanese referred to as “Max” the
entire trip, was after some of the fish he studied during his dissertation, in
particular the lizardfishes. Lizardfishes include cigar-shaped predatory fishes
that dwell along the bottom of the continental slope to depths of around 200
meters. Of particular note were specimens collected of the only mesopelagic
lizardfish genus Harpadon, commonly known as the “Bombay Duck” and found
only in the Indo-Pacific. (The nickname comes from Indian restaurateurs trying
to make the fish sound more appetizing to British diners.) Dried Harpadon is
considered a delicacy in parts of Asia, and indeed we often spotted hundreds of
dried out specimens lying on the street, a sight that would make Matt cringe each time. In the end we
managed to procure quite a few fresh specimens, including a potentially new
species that exhibits sexual dimorphism.
Near the end of the trip we
went out collecting on the Mekong Delta. It took some work getting to the
Mekong and hiring a boat but once aboard we would ask our driver (ask as in point
to a boat and to a picture of a fish) to take us toward the small fishing boats
trawling the Mekong. It was by trading with boatman that we collected some of
the most interesting freshwater and brackish water specimens. Nearly every
specimen collected is new to the LSU collection, and some are certainly new to
science. The products of the trip will be additional materials for our on going
projects on the family level phylogenies of some notable deepsea,
bioluminescent, and otherwise poorly studied Western Indo