In Memoriam: Alf Johnels

My former superviser, Alf G. Johnels, passed away on 24 May, 2010, at age 93.

Alf has a long and interesting professional record, crowned by his professorship at the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History (1958-1982), and his presidency of the Royal Swedish Academy 1981-1983. He was also a key person in the discovery of mercury poisoning in Sweden in the 1960s, which laid the foundation for advanced ecotoxicology. By analyzing bird feathers in museum collections, Alf and collaborators could show that mercury poisoning in birds coincided with the introduction of methyl mercury as a pesticide. This led to the establishment of a biobank at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in which samples are preserved under sterile conditions, and which will enable the study of time series of toxic substances in the environment.

More important for us, however, is Alf's ichthyological career. It started in early childhood, and led him to become a fisheries biologist first — to be certain of a fallback — but he also studied lamprey anatomy at the Zootomical Institute (now Department of Zoology) of the Stockholm University where he obtained his PhD in 1948. Those were the days when anatomy was important, and every biologist knew the name of every cell and every structure inside an animal, and the Zootomical Institute had several world renowned researchers of the kind. Alf and others in Stockholm were very much interested in the early development of fishes, as a way to understand the formation of organs in adult fish. The one major field trip Alf made had as objective to sample ontogenetic series of various "primitive" fishes, principally lungfish and bichirs.

Together with Ragnar Olsson and Björn Afzelius he travelled to the Gambia in 1950, staying there from May till November. This was long before the Gambia became a tourist spot. The trio settled in Bansang, in the middle of a swampy area full of lungfish and bichirs. They searched out nests of these species, and took out and preserved some eggs, later larvae, about every day. They also collected other fish, of course, and together with the material from an earlier expedition in 1932, the University built up a significant collection of Gambian fishes. The collection is now in the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The team also took back quite a number of living fishes, and some of the smaller species entered the aquarium trade in Stockholm for a while.

In 1954 Alf produced a descriptive catalog of the collections made at Bansang, in which he described three new species, Pellonula afzeliusi, Syngnathus olssoni, and Barbus svenssoni. Unfortunately, they are all synonyms. Chrysichthys johnelsi, named after himself by Daget, is however still a valid species. He also produced a small paper about the scales of Gambian fishes, showing that in the low water/dry period, the scales are eroded at the margin.

The Swedish Expedition to the Gambia, 1950. 

From left to right Björn Afzelius, Alf Johnels, and Ragnar Olsson. Photo Alf Johnels.

After retirement, Alf had time to devote to his main passion, salmon fishing, going fishing ever so often to Norway and returning empty-handed. One of his last works was a descriptive catalog of the salmon rivers of southern Norway. Nevertheless, he kept coming to the museum every day till just a few years ago when his health conditions became preventive.

Alf was a very special person, always neatly dressed, always a bowtie on, always well articulated on any subject of science. His mind wasn't as conventional as his dress, and he described himself as more of an engineer than a scientist. It is well remembered when he helped us fishing stone loaches — dressed in suit, and using his umbrella as fishing gear.

References
Johnels, A.G. 1954. Notes on fishes from the Gambia River. Arkiv för Zoologi, 6: 327-411.
Berg, W., A. Johnels, B. Sjöstrand & T. Westermark. 1966. Mercury content in feathers of Swedish birds from the past 100 years. Oikos, 17: 71-83.

In Memoriam: Fang Fang

Fang in the lab, May 2002. Photo (c) Staffan Waerndt.

Little has appeared in this blog lately, although its author is never far from the keyboard. The main reason has been the year-long, now ended suffering of my wife and research team member, Fang Fang. The last paper that she actively authored will appear the coming week, and it seems timely to write something about Fang here and now.

Fang was born in Beijing in 1962. She had an MSc in fish biology and left a position at the Institute of Zoology in Beijing when she came to Sweden in 1993 to do her PhD at Stockholm University. With time she turned Swedish, and completed her PhD with a dissertation on danios which she defended in 2001 with Richard P. Vari as opponent.

Fang remained all the time with the Swedish Museum of Natural History, upholding various positions, eventually as a curator in the Swedish FishBase team where, among other things, she was the key person behind the triannual Artedi Symposia. She was probably the greatest fan of Artedi ever. For over two years she also coordinated ECOCARP, a major collaborative project with several European and Chinese laboratories joining to search for Asian aquaculture fish candidates. Over the last years there was not much time for research. She was secretary in the European Ichthyological Society, member of the IUCN freshwater fish specialist group, and much more. Nonetheless, she was the author of 30 papers, and two are still to appear.

Fang passed away on 19 May, 2010, after a year of fight against cancer. She is buried in the St. Botvid cemetery south of Stockholm, in a peaceful setting overlooking a bay of Lake Mälaren.

Fang was an open, cheerful person that made many friends within and outside science, and in many ways made ichthyology more fun. With her passing, Ichthyology has lost much of its charm.

Fang's research focussed on danios. Her favorite fish was one she discovered in Myanmar in 1997, a very distinctive danio, golden with dark brown spots, which she named Danio kyathit. It  soon became a much appreciated aquarium fish. Although there is a species named after her, Devario fangfangae, her name will probably be more firmly associated with Danio kyathit. Her legacy includes an additional nine species of Danio and Devario, and several other taxa.

Read more about Fang on the family's memorial web site.

Species of danios described by Fang:

Devario maetaengensis (Fang, 1997) 
Danio kyathit Fang, 1998 
Devario apopyris (Fang & Kottelat, 1999) 
Devario leptos (Fang & Kottelat, 1999)
Devario acrostomus (Fang & Kottelat, 1999) 
Danio roseus Fang & Kottelat, 2000 
Danio aesculapii Kullander & Fang, 2009 
Danio quagga Kullander, Liao & Fang, 2009 
Danio tinwini Kullander & Fang, 2009 
Devario xyrops Fang & Kullander, 2009

Cleaning out the bugs: fruitfly name to be based on science not convention

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature just published an opinion on  the name of a laboratory animal known as fruit fly, and identified as Drosophila melanogaster. Yes, that standard lab creature to sort into phenotypes during genetics classes. An application was made in 2007 requesting that if phylogenetic research would show that the fruit fly does not belong in the genus Drosophila (it has always been in the subgenus Sophophora, which then is the best candidate), the generic name should nevertheless follow it by making D. melanogaster type species of Drosophila. There was quite some discussion, difficult to understand the heat of, because the fruit fly hasn't had its name changed yet, or anything very near. Many opposed to a potential change of the generic name for melanogaster, and supported the application. There were also voices to let taxonomy have its way, change the name if need be.

In fishes, the zebrafish, tilapias, and rainbow trout - maybe a magnitude less published on, but nevertheless important species beyond ichthyological introversions — change name in a snap the day the message comes. People were equally happy with Danio rerio then Brachydanio rerio and then Danio rerio again. Tilapias are known now mostly as Oreochromis — bothers noone. And the rainbow trout is Oncorhynchus mykiss — not Salmo gardneri (doubt very few remember this "well-known" name anymore). Entomologists may be less elastic than ichthyologists, giving them more headache and pains. Ichthyologists know that fish (no scientific name known) are a paraphyletic group, nevertheless do not demand that Pisces must be used by force.

The reflection of systematics in the names of organisms and groups of organisms is one of the strengths of Zoological Nomenclature. When a species goes from a bad to a better generic allocation based on scientific evidence it gets a new generic name, and that is a very strong signal of progress. Otherwise perhaps day-to-day taxonomic landwinnings would go unnoticed. As evidenced by thousands and thousands of nameshifts over time, this is not a challenge at all to systematics or science otherwise.

Nevertheless, as in all communities there are other opinions. One drawback of nameshifts is that literature searches get more complicated, one has to seach for two instead of one name. In some databases, such as GBIF and FishBase this is taken care of because FishBase and other databases keep synonymies and serve results under the presently valid name regardless of what name was used in the references. Not magic, hard manual work over the years. But so, if you look in older literature from Artedi onward, a large part of the species descriptions are taken up by synonymies, name lists in which authors made an effort to list all mentions of a particular species. This is not done anymore because the lists would become too long and require an amount of double-checking that few modern workers can afford. Instead we look forward to the Global Names Architecture and dependable search and retrieve databases based on resources such as ZooBank. Managing names, however, will not reduce the really major problem with the knowledgebase, namely misidentifications. A solution with misidentifications has been proposed that uses species concepts (based on stated definition of a taxon by and author) instead of named species, but that approach is not very helpful because it tends to have  a different concept of the same species for every publication, and in principle makes the name independent of the species. No gain. So, we are going from Opera omnia to history-free papers, and that causes worries (about names, where the worry should be about misidentifications) and technology will need to come to rescue. And will. Someday.

Back to the fruit fly. When I was a student it was called banana fly (it is actually a vinegar fly...?), like all other small flies swarming around the fruit in the summer. What scientific name it had did not matter to teachers or students alike. And there are lots of fruit flies that are not Drosophila, D. melanogaster, or even the same family. The paraphyletic genus Drosophila as of today has 1,450 species.

The Commission has now (April 2010) issued an Opinion in response to the Application to change the type species of Drosophila to be melanogaster. The Commission says no - 23 against 4. Commissioners have different opinions, but seem to converge on the case being about taxonomy, not nomenclature, so it is not a matter for the Commission. It is also mentioned that one should not deal with hypothetical cases, as this one - actually the fruit fly is still in its old genus. You can read it all on the Commission website: ICZN Opinion on Case 3407


A Google search today finds 1,040,000 results for fruitfly (includes fruit fly); 1,570,000 for  "Drosophila melanogaster", and an astonishing 2,880,000 for Drosophila without melanogaster, suggesting that he scientific species name combination is not that worked in rock. Nonetheless, Sophophora melanogaster has currently only 93,700. Let's see how that has changed a year or two from now.

And the winner is:

Fruit fly busy with something else. Photo: Botaurus, Wikimedia. Public domain.

Danio year 2009: Rakhine Yoma

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.

Stockholm area, Sweden, late December 2009

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 

At last: calendar boy

Being a well-known figure in fish circles can lead to occasional highlights. Last year I delivered my first fan autograph, quite unexpectedly, and I know I didn't manage it with the speed of a movie celebrity. And now, the next step in an ichthyological career: calendar boy. Chatting with Christer Fredriksson in his shop Akvarielagret, Christer came up with the idea to include me and my goldfish pot in the annual calendar of the Nordic Cichlid Society. And that did not work out, so the outcome is actually a shot in front of the two aquariums in our lab corridor (African lungfish in one, some other fish in the other), holding a jar of Cichla, wearing a T-shirt from the Sydney Aquarium, and a FishBase vest.

Christer is a highly motivated aquarist and innovative entrepreneur with the largest aquarium shop in Stockholm, and probably the most interesting shop in terms of fishes because he is not only focussed on selling, but also displaying and breeding quite a number of less common species. The business was recently expanded to include the Butterfly House at the northern outskirts of Stockholm (actually in Solna, the siamese twin city of Stockholm) which is now being converted to have more aquatic components. The most interesting recent move, however, was to convert supplier pricelists into a searchable online database. Customers can seach for the fish they are interested in, see the approximate retail price, and order online for pickup at shipment arrival. This saves time and money for both parties. Christer does not have to guess what customers may like, and customers can make more directed decisions.

Christer is also a persistent supporter of the Nordic Cichlid Society (Nordiska Ciklidsällskapet), which has one of the finest cichlid journals in the world, presently edited by Ola Svensson who recently graduated from Stockholm University.

You may indeed wish to join the Nordic Cichlid Society, not least for the 2010 calendar with me in it (and a number of more worthy celebrities), but also for the many well-written articles and so many beautiful photos of cichlids in the Society journal. The only bad thing is that they insist on using Metriaclima instead of the senior synonym Maylandia, and that something that really needs a blog later on.

Links
Akvarielagret
Nordiska ciklidsällskapet