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Some fish identified
and labelled in English and Arabic by students.
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Bill Ludt and I returned to the Middle East this
April going back to Kuwait and adding Abu Dhabi to make our regional
collections. Again, we had the wonderful LSU alum Dr. Jim Bishop host us. Jim organized and had specimens waiting for
us collected by Kuwaiti research vessels in advance of our arrival. We also
were asked to present a five-day short course at the Kuwait Institute of
Scientific Research (KISR) titled “Taxonomy and Identification of Fishes from
the Arabian Gulf” – teaching this course allowed us to pay for this trip and
make our collections which otherwise would have been impossible. Each morning
we lectured from 9 to 11:30, and each afternoon we held two-hour labs. It was
exhausting but fulfilling work, for both the instructors and students. In the
lectures we covered topics ranging from taxonomy, systematics, and museum
studies of fishes, to early explorers of the region (Jim’s section) and the
geology of the Arabian Gulf (Bill’s section). In the lab we sorted the collections
made in the previous weeks by a KISR research vessel, and the students learned
to use keys and identification guides to put scientific names on each specimen.
They also created their own characters to help with identification. There were
19 students in all, many of them from KISR but some coming from as far away as
Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The first language of all the students was
Arabic, and although they all spoke English, the language used in field guides
can be quite obscure even to a native English speaker. My job was to
help them understand the regional guides and to help them personalize their own
guide to fishes from the region. I pointed out to them the oddity that an
American was teaching them about their fishes, but LSU has one of the
best recent collections of Persian Gulf fishes in the world (thanks to our past
efforts). I also pressed upon them the need to create a reference collection of
vouchered fishes somewhere in Kuwait. No natural history collection exists
anywhere in the Arabian Peninsula (the nearest one is in Iran). I pointed out to
them that if there is loss of species from an oil spill or climate change, that
there is only institutional memory to make note of the shifting or declining
diversity. A reference collection could help keep better track of the changing
diversity.
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| Students seining in Kuwait Bay. Dissection of a butterflyray. |
We went through nearly 100 species from the Gulf during the class. Bill and I brought back hundreds of specimens
and tissue samples to LSU, many of which are new to collections (we sampled 100 different species last year). With
Kuwait having only about 350 species, we now have many of those at LSU.
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| Early morning fish market. |
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| The High Line at NYU Abu Dhabi. |
After the
course was completed Bill and I flew to the United Arab Emirates to the newly
built New York University, Abu Dhabi (NYU) campus. As a New Yorker I spent much
of my teenage years loafing around lower Manhattan trying to decide what fun
thing to do. The area around NYU was where all the cool college kids hung
around and as an awkward high schooler it looked like paradise. Now as a grizzled,
rapidly aging professor, NYU Abu Dhabi looked a lot like academic paradise. It
was a relatively small campus (<25 buildings) but arranged in a beautiful
way with the top floors connected by an overpass walkway that was a replica of
the famous High Line in New York. The dorms, labs, and classrooms had an
ultramodern design and it appeared that no expense was spared. No expense, it
seemed, was ever spared in Abu Dhabi; buildings were being put up as fast as
weeds in a Louisiana garden. We saw the sites of new Louvre and Guggenheim
museums being built along with dozens of new skyscrapers. It was a sight to
behold. We were hosted by the lab of Dr. John Bert an NYU faculty member who
works on the local marine fauna (mostly corals). Each day Bill and I ventured
out to the local fish market, which was luckily quite expansive, and got a fair
sampling of the regional fauna (around 40 species) over the course of several
days. One day we ventured out at 5am to see the fish come in and it was quite an
amazing sight. There were many hundreds of groupers, butterfish, mackerel, and
other important food fishes being auctioned off for sale throughout the region.
Unfortunately for us, there was little bycatch (the left over unsold and
undesirable fish that typically have a great diversity from which to sample).
Many of the fishes being sold were caught by traps and so there is a limit to the
range of species being collected. This limit may be good for the environment
but not so great for a visiting ichthyologist. Bill and I spent our afternoons
sorting, identifying and prepping the specimens, which we did in a beautiful
shared molecular lab space. In past trips we are often stuck stinking up a hotel
bathroom with formalin and rapidly decomposing fish; in this luxurious lab
setting we wore fresh new white lab coats and prepped under a fume hood.
Teaching
the fish course and getting the collections from Abu Dhabi and Kuwait led Bill
and I to come up with some pretty good ideas for additional research projects.
We are again in discussions to return to the region for sometime next year.
Stay tuned for more about our Middle Eastern adventures in the future.
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| Jim showing some beautiful fish plates from a historical regional book. |
None of
this again would be possible without the help of Jim Bishop, who not only was extraordinary in his efforts to get us fish and the right connections throughout the
region, but with his wife Ginni put us up at their home and fed us like we were part of their family. Thanks Jim and Ginni!