In the South Pacific for some Ichthyology

In late September my PhD student Bill Ludt and I traveled to the beautiful island of Tahiti to attend the 10^th Indo Pacific Fish Conference. This meeting takes place every four years and I have been anticipating this trip since Bill and I went to the last meeting in Okinawa in 2013. I also knew that I couldn’t go all this way not to collect fishes. As with other conferences in remote locales, and most field trips, it took a while to get permits; we were lucky to get them a day before our planned travel began (even though Bill had been working on them for more than a year).

Also joining us for part of the trip was LSU Biology professor Brant Faircloth. Brant and I submitted a proposal to run a symposium on fish systematics focusing on ultraconserved elements. Our session ultimately became part of a half day symposium called ‘Genes to Genomes: Forging ahead in the study of marine evolution” which we were happy to help organize. (Special thanks to Dr. Michelle Gaither who was the lead organizer and did all the heavy lifting.)

Soon after arriving we knew we were in paradise - an expensive French paradise. My French is passable, but most of the locals we met also spoke English as well their local Polynesian dialects. I always wanted to come to Tahiti, not so much for its fishes or the beautiful teal-colored water, but because I loved the history of Captains Cook and Bligh in this region; and because of films like Marlon Brando’s Mutiny on the Bounty.

We went to the central fish market in Papeete around 5am the first few mornings to see what we could get. We made nice collections of local wrasses, goatfish, and unicornfish among other colorful, if odd-looking, species. At the local grocery store we did come across a large specimen of an Opah, or “Moonfish” which gained some notoriety recently as being “warm blooded” – although some ichthyologists remain unconvinced. Sadly the specimen was too big to collect, and already had it’s gills removed.

Opah at market (left), butterflyfish (top), and unicornfish.

We also traveled to the island of Moorea, which is about a 45min ferry ride from Tahiti. This island is home to, among other things, the Gump Research Station run by UC Berkeley. The Gump helped us get our permits but we were unfortunately unable to collect on Moorea. We had to settle for a lovely day snorkeling in crystal clear water surrounded by lush green mountains.

The conference started a few days after our arrival, and it had about 500 attendees from around the world. Bill, Brant and I all spoke in the first session of the first day after the plenaries. The Indo Pacific Fish Conference is one of my favorites because I get to see many of the European, Asian and African colleagues I often don’t see at conferences in North or South America. Bill and I started several important collaborations that hopefully will make for some fruitful publications over the next few months and years.

Bill, Brant and I in Cook Bay, Moorea; Bill on stage presenting his talk.

Although we didn’t hit the markets again during the meeting, I did get to collect some introduced guppies. The extent of my freshwater fieldwork was putting a bag down into a sewer off the main road in Tahiti and letting it fill with water then pulling the bag out of the water to find that 50 individual guppies had swam into the bag. Many of these specimens were mailed off to a colleague studying the introduction of guppies around the world. He was very happy to get individuals from this distant and isolated population.

            I’ll spare you more details about the fish conference and swimming with humpbacks (as I did) and tiger sharks (as Bill did) and such, but rest assured this was no vacation (although it obviously wasn’t all work either). The conference was a great opportunity to talk about our work, including one collaboration that recently yielded the cover of Systematic Biology (Chakrabarty & Faircloth et al. 2017; left). That publication created some great opportunities to work with other scientists interested in using genomic fragments like ultraconserved elements in their phylogenetic studies of fishes.