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| Bill Ludt, Jim Bishop and me in downtown Kuwait City. |
From June 13th to the 22nd my PhD
student, Bill Ludt, and I travelled to Kuwait to collect fishes for the LSU Museum
of Natural Science ichthyology collection. (This was the 3rd trip that
Bill and I have now made to Asia in the last two years.) Over my career I’ve made
collections from much of the Indo-West Pacific but am lacking some critical
Middle East collections. The Middle East is underrepresented in most fish
collections worldwide and because many of the species from the region are
poorly known there is a potential that some of them are new to science. When Dr.
Jim Bishop invited us to go to Kuwait last year I knew it would be an
opportunity we shouldn’t pass up.
Jim Bishop
is familiar to many people in the LSU community; he is an alumnus and a great
sponsor of art and research at Louisiana State University. Jim has a wonderful
enthusiasm about the work being done at the museum, and he has provided many
specimens to our collections in the past. He is also one of the most cultured,
kind, and energetic individuals I have ever met. Bill and I were lucky enough
to stay with Jim and his wonderful wife Virginia at their home in Kuwait City.
We frankly could not have figured our way out of the local airport without them,
let alone find the fishes we were targeting. Kuwait is an interesting country
with a rich and ancient history that was transformed by the unimaginable wealth
that came about through the oil industry. All throughout the places we visited
you can see this dichotomy between an ancient desert civilization and a
transitioning modern society. The temperature was rarely below 100 degrees even
at night, and frequently much higher - this was the desert after all, but the
roadways were green with introduced shrubbery that was irrigated with
desalinated seawater. Locals wore traditional Islamic garbs (abbeys for women, dishdashas for men) but there were also many
expats from India, Syria and the West. It wasn’t always clear when we were
seeing the real Kuwait or just the veneer around it.
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| Bill Ludt rocking the guitarfish. |
Our first days
were spent going through the many collections Jim had already obtained for us.
Through his work at KISR (Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research) he was able
to arrange for specimens of notable material to be held for our visit. These
specimens were collected by boat trawls in and around the Arabian Gulf (what we
call the Persian Gulf) over the past few years. By the end of the first day we
had already gone through hundreds of samples that were a very good
representation of Kuwait’s ichthyofauna. Jim had meticulous notes for these
materials and much of it was preserved in alcohol (rather than fixed in
formalin) so we were able to take DNA samples as well. The majority of the
materials that we brought back to LSU are these collections from KISR. We also
made substantial collections from the local fish markets, which included
material from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The local fishmongers sold an
amazing variety of species on a daily basis. Although the exact localities of
this material will remain unknown it was nice to get additional material from
around region. We also did some collecting of samples from the oceans ourselves
going out at low tide to collect blennies, gobies and toadfishes from the sandy
intertidal zone.
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| Mudskipper: a fish that doesn't mind being out of water. |
We were also able to catch a few
mudskippers on one of our last collecting days; these fishes are among my
favorite animals to catch, and my least favorite fish to anesthetize. These
fishes, which spend most of their time out of the water, are incredibly cute,
with big bulgy eyes at the top of their heads and an expressive “face” that
makes them look like muppets. They live in muddy areas and keep water trapped
in their gills while they scurry about the surface building territories and
escape routes. The mud they live in is hard to traverse and the larger individuals
were in waist deep mud that made it impossible for us to catch them. We stuck
mostly to the shoreline trying to catch smaller individuals. Even these small
ones are amazingly adept at getting away. We saw hundreds of these mudskippers
and ended up catching only about ten. We were covered in mud by the end of the
day and the incredible heat made the conditions rather harsh but ‘mudskippering’
is always great fun.
All in all
we brought back close to 80 species from Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf and
roughly 300 new tissue samples and close to 500 specimens. We also built an
important relationship with the folks at KISR. Jim invited me to give a presentation
there and my talk, “What We Learned from the 2010 Gulf of
Mexico Oil Spill: and other projects from Louisiana State University”
was well received. We have also started
some collaborative projects with researchers at KISR. We are trying to arrange
making a short course in ichthyology that Bill and I would teach sometime in
the spring at KISR, and hopefully we will try to sample from other parts of the
Middle East as well. In fact this article is hopefully just the first of many we
will produce from these trips to the birthplace of civilization.
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| A stonefish, the most venomous of all fishes. |
