Armchair Adventures: Scientist Slide Shows Bring the Field to the Web

Tuesday, October 12 11:02 am

A century ago, James Chapin and Herbert Lang ventured into what was then considered the “heart of darkness” to survey and collect specimens along the Congo River for the American Museum of Natural History. Their adventures included leopard attacks, swimming monkeys, and a multitude of colorful new birds and fish. But these experiences were translated to readers several years after returning to New York as a treatise of freshwater fishes (1917) and a short history penned by Henry Fairfield Osborn (1919). Decades later, in 2002, the Museum put together a beautiful online narrative and gallery.

Today’s information age, in contrast, makes it easy to virtually follow scientists to the field. Earlier this year, Melanie Stiassny, Axelrod Research Curator in the Museum’s Department of Ichthyology, reported from the Upper Congo River for The New York Times’ “Scientist at Work: Notes from the Field“ blog.  Now, the primary funder of this field research, the National Science Foundation, has created a slide show of the expedition’s highlights narrated by Dr. Stiassny.

Fishing in the Heart of Darkness

Wednesday, August 11 3:01 pm

Melanie Stiassny (J. Black) and a tiger fish from the Congo River (J. Lowenstein).

Now readers of The New York Times can travel with Melanie Stiassny, the Axelrod Research Curator in the Department of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, to the world’s second largest river basin. Stiassny is blogging for The New York Times’s “Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field“ while surveying the fishes in remote tributaries of the Congo River. But first she had to get there, and the journey is not an easy one.

“Plans are shaping up well,” Stiassny writes in the first posting, dated August 10. “With any luck we will be leaving early tomorrow morning, hitching a ride on WWF’s speedboat, which is making a two-day journey upriver to the small settlement of Tshumbiri on the main channel of the middle Congo River. From there we will travel some 30 miles by “road” to the WWF’s Malebo field station. I say “road” because the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country the size of western Europe, only has a few hundred kilometers of paved roads outside the cities. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Stiassny has spent the last four years surveying the Lower Congo River as part of The Congo Project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation. This stretch of river has extremely complex hydrology that can wall off populations of fish into what amount to islands in the water, and Stiassny’s morphological and genetic research of these fish show that this stretch of river is one of the most diverse, in terms of fish, in the world, home to more than 300 species.

On this trip, Stiassny is heading upriver with colleagues to look for the source of the diversity downriver. She and her team will be searching the Malebo area for the fish in two different tributary systems of the Congo River, one that drains directly into the main channel and another that drains into the Kasai River. In short, Stiassny is looking for the populations that seeded the diversity in the Lower Congo, searching for answers in an area that has never been surveyed scientifically.

“Apparently, despite a regular appearance in stewing pots all over the region, the fishes of these waters have never been explored ichthyologically,” writes Stiassny in the blog. “Time to change that.”

For additional information, see Stiassny in the Lower Congo in the video “Evolution in Action” from the Museum’s Science Bulletins.

SciCafe Presents Mysteries of the Congo

Monday, December 28 12:17 pm

What strange new species lurk beneath? Join Museum Curator Melanie Stiassny, an ichthyologist who has been featured on The Colbert Report, as she answers this question and discusses her teams adventures and amazing discoveries in Africa’s Congo River, the deepest in the world.

Surrounded by magnificent geological specimens in the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, enjoy the Museum after hours with music, drinks, and thought-provoking conversation at the next installment of the popular new SciCafe series at the American Museum of Natural History. SciCafe features cutting-edge science, cocktails, and conversation and takes place on the first Wednesday of every month.

SciCafe’s Mysteries of the Congo: Exploring the World’s Deepest River takes place in AMNH’s Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth on Wednesday, January 6th at 7 p.m.

Evolution on Steroids: Bizarre Fish of the Congo Featured in New Video

Tuesday, December 22 10:23 am

Africa’s Lower Congo River is home not only to the world’s most extreme rapids but also to an extremely diverse assortment of fish. At last count, 320 species—some with bizarre features like long snouts, tiny eyes, and colorless skin—swim in the river’s 350 kilometers of roiling brown water. “I call it evolution on steroids,” says Melanie Stiassny, curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History. (You can hear Stiassny discuss her team’s adventures and discoveries in the Congo River at the January 6 SciCafe, the Museum’s new after-hours series).

What’s driving the rapid fish evolution in Lower Congo? The Congo Project, an ongoing research effort led by Stiassny and Museum ichthyologist Bob Schelly, is converging on an answer: the river’s turbulence itself. Their work is featured in a new production by Science Bulletins, the Museum’s high-definition current-science video program.

After several field seasons identifying new species, Stiassny realized her team was only scratching the surface of the powerful forces that can steer fish evolution. “We hadn’t been looking at the river the way a fish would look at the river,” she says. “We didn’t really know anything about what was below the surface.” So in a recent field season, the fish scientists teamed with water scientists as well as with world-class kayakers to make a historic riverbed survey. The researchers rigged one of the kayaks with a GPS logger and an echo sounder, a device that directs pulses of sound waves toward the river bottom to measure its depth. Read more »