narelleart

[narelleart]

I recently attended the 2024 All-Aquarium Catfish convention.

Those that know me will remember this as an event I attend regularly. It's held every two years. Last year was the last time the original club in the DC area was willing to host it (2022 was their 9th one), but the Tropical Fish Club of Burlington agreed to take it on this year to keep the tradition alive. (They only agreed to take on for just this year, but it sounds like someone will continue it again in 2026.)

It was great to see familiar faces again and meet new ones. I really love talking to hardcore hobbyists, especially catfish people. Compared to the scientific conferences I'm going to nowadays, hobby conventions really just hit different. A scientific conference is still a work event, so networking and appearances are still a big deal even if the people are chill. A hobby convention is just pure unbridled love of the fishes and the hobby as a whole. Catfish hobbyists, more than anyone else, really are my people.

TFCB did a great job with their first Catcon. My only major complaint is the same one I always have: It was too short! I wish I had another day or two to hang out with my cool fish people.

I might start giving some talks for clubs and conventions going forward. 🤔 I had some invites. Keep an eye out on speaker lists for events like this!

[narelleart]

When I held these fishes in my hands it brought tears to my eyes.

(Left: Nanobagrus immaculatus; Right, Nanobagrus nebulosus)

[narelleart]

Came across a paper on domestic goldfish that showed the same thing I've been saying this whole time - these short bodied breeds have been bred to extremes, causing disfigurements that impair them. This study (Le Verger et al, 2024) showed reductions in brain size, modification of weberian ossicles (used for hearing in otophysan fishes), and reductions of the swim bladder (including near or complete loss of the posterior chamber in some breeds). But it also had citations I want to go back and read about things like lack of space for organs, propencity for infections, and loss of vertebrae.

I'll have to read up and do a longer writeup with full citations sometime, after things settle down. If I remember. ^^;;

Anyways, in the mean time:

Science agrees - "fancy" shortbodied goldfish breeds push their morphology to extremes at the expense of their health and ability to behave naturally.

[narelleart]

I'm absolutely obsessed with my current D&D character which is great for D&D but it makes it hard to focus on work sometimes. I super need to write my thesis whoops.

So anyways let me tell you about my dumb clown son.

This is Pascal:

I've found a love for medival clown fashion design? Pascal likes to sew and designs his own costumes so I get to draw lots of fun clothes for him. He makes them all kind of modular so he can mix and match pieces and be dressed differently every day.

Here's some more of his outfits. This one was party wear, for a masquerade:

We recently got winter gear which he dismantled and turned into clowny stuff, so here's his winter outfit:

I forgot his necklace and didn't color the earring in the winter one, but I was slapping this together in a rush to be able to show my party what I did with the nice practical warm weather gear they bought for me. ^^;;

Odds are low my party will ever see this, but just in case - MASSIVE SPOILERS below the cut! Pascal's got hella secrets!

Pascal has spent his life as a clown to hide that he is actually a tiefling. He is the son of a half elf and the archdevil Levistus (though he has no idea who his dad is), so he claims he is a half elf and does all he can to hide his tiefling traits. His horns are very short and about the same color as his hair, so he can just tease his hair really big and/or wear a hat to hide those. His tail he binds to his leg then hides that under poofy shorts. Exposed white except for his face and ears in the above images is all fabric (long gloves and stockings), and his face and ears are covered in thick makeup. He's blue, actually.

-cut-

All party members gone? Good.

Like this:

My party has just arrived at our first major plot destination and it's turned out to be a place cursed by Levistus. The rest of the party has only had fairly vague allusions to this and doesn't know Levistus has anything to do with me (all they know is Pascal is a clown and probably a half elf or something). To be fair, it's not like Pascal knows he has anything to do with Levistus either.

(His secrets come in layers, so there's more to uncover down the line. 1. He's a tiefling. 2. His dad's Levistus. 3. His mother's curse is from her trying to break a pact with Levistus, which he was supposed to be the payment for - as a warrior for Levistus to do his bidding in the material plane.)

The party has been super nice and respectful of Pascal's quirks and dodginess (he will only sleep alone, in his own tent or a separate room; he doesn't eat in front of them; if he gets cuts he gets away from them and focuses on stitching up his clothes and ignores the bleeding). It's very sweet but it means they take zero bait to be nosy about what his deal is.

So my DM has checked with me about setting something up to expose his secrets in some way? I'm excited. 👀 Can't wait for the party to realize he's a liar. He's going to be so upset, it'll be great.

[narelleart]

I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

[narelleart]

Oh also there's potential for the work I'm doing to reveal a massive conservation bluder being actively made by government fish and wildfe management agencies here in the US. 😬 More to come on that if I can confirm my suspicions.

But its got me wondering about the biggest modern conservation blunders? Anyone know any they can share?

I'm talking about actions taken as a positive step towards conservation (especially if trying to conserve imperiled species) that turned out to have the opposite effect. Not so much the dumb stuff humans did back in the day for other motives, like hunting species to extinction or introducing invasives because we wanted them around for food.

[narelleart]

Hm, I think I need a new header line for my tumblr. I think I can call myself a systematic ichthyologist now. I'm not really an "ichthyologist in the making" anymore, though I'm still learning.

[narelleart]

All my deadlines are fast approaching. 💀

I need to get my proposal formally submitted by next week, then be done with the whole actual thesis by the end of the month. Defend early June. Conference mid July. Move before the end of summer?? Start the new PhD late August?

I just finished the proposal, other than any last minute revisions I need to make after my committee reviews it, so that's one thing done. But I'm still actively collecting data and adding more specimens?? So much work left to do. 💀 So little time.

But I expect to describe several species based on this work I've been doing so there's that.

[narelleart]

Oh! I just realized I never posted updates. It looks like the last anyone here heard about my academic pursuits was still mostly about recovering from my traumatic experience with my original PI.

My PI that I am doing the MS with is excellent, a fantastic mentor. I'm really happy to have gotten to work with her. She was exactly who I needed coming out of that bad situation.

If all goes well, I should be defending my MS thesis early this summer. Afterwards I'm scheduled to attend a conference and present on the same project.

I have been accepted to a new PhD program starting Fall 2024, so I'll also be moving again this summer. The PI I will be working with there is great. I think this time I'll have both a good research fit and a good mentorship fit. We already planned my dissertation chpaters out during recruitment (this usually happens over the course of your first year of the program so big deal that we knocked it out before even being officially admitted) and discussed making trips to Southeast Asia to sample fishes!

My MS was a detour into American Poeciliids, but I will be back to catfishes and Southeast Asian freshwater fishes when I start PhD take 2. I'm super excited!!

The part that feels a little odd is that until this semester, I was still officially in the system here as a PhD student so I've been very aware that I was supposed to be a 3rd year PhD at this point. It feels so strange to be going back to 1st year PhD. Other people enter PhDs with a MS, but those are typically MS degrees started with the intent to get an MS. I know the ropes of being a PhD student already but will be masquerading as a fresh new student. Weird.

[narelleart]

Oh also I do still need this. Someone in my aquarium club is trying to get it for me but its slow going.

A couple people in the notes suggested contacting the author directly but this isnt a normal scientific article (or I'd have acces through my institution because I too am a scientist). The author of this article is the one who made/runs this website and requires you to join and give *way too much* personal information before you're able to get a copy of this. So I haven't contacted him but I think he'd want me to follow the rules he set for everyone else.

I was hoping to luck out and find someone who was already a member with access that I could mooch off of.

Anyone here a killi person involved in killi clubs?

I need access to an article that's locked behind a membership to Killi-Data. I'm hoping to find someone that already has access so I don't have to join.

Here's the one I need:

Huber, J. H. 2019 (31 Aug.) A nomenclatural and systematic analysis of livebearing Cyprinodontiformes (Acanthopterygii: Anablepsinae, Goodeinae, Poeciliidae). Killi-Data Series 2019: 4-155.

[Link]

(All I actually need is the bit on the Poeciliidae.)

I am pretty sure it won't have any new information that I need for my science, but I need to confirm because it's listed on Catalog of Fishes as a relevant citation for taxonomy in one of my study species.

[narelleart]

I kind of want to be a tumblr again.

[narelleart]

Anyone here a killi person involved in killi clubs?

I need access to an article that's locked behind a membership to Killi-Data. I'm hoping to find someone that already has access so I don't have to join.

Here's the one I need:

Huber, J. H. 2019 (31 Aug.) A nomenclatural and systematic analysis of livebearing Cyprinodontiformes (Acanthopterygii: Anablepsinae, Goodeinae, Poeciliidae). Killi-Data Series 2019: 4-155.

[Link]

(All I actually need is the bit on the Poeciliidae.)

I am pretty sure it won't have any new information that I need for my science, but I need to confirm because it's listed on Catalog of Fishes as a relevant citation for taxonomy in one of my study species.

[narelleart]

I wrote this as both a vent and an apology for my absence.

I am still recovering from this orderal, but I have a new PI who is excellent and supportive, everything I needed, and I am moving steadily forward on the path to an MS.

The more space I've had from this experience, time from the split with my original PI, the more I realize just how bad things were. He wasn't only disceiminitory, he was a toxic PI in general. He set impossible expectations and refused to give me any amount of mentorship or guidance, then it was my fault for not being able to produce the products he expected (work that requires training he knew I didn't have and refused to give me). He called me a failure and stupid because I didn't know how to be a postdoc the moment I arrived to start a PhD, coming straight from undergrad as a first-gen college student with no background in systematics.

I thought I was enduring it all okay, considering, but now that I have space I realize how much I absorbed and how much that shaped me. He destroyed my confidence, which is a major character trait of mine (approaching things I'm passionate about with an unearned level of confidence).

I was working 12 hours a day 7 days a week when not actively sick to try to teach myself how to do any of this and keep up with the mountain of work I was being buried under by him, the course demands, and my TAships. I am realizing now hoe productive I can be within reasonable working hours when I have any amount of guidance and communication, and just how much I've given up in my free time. I didn't allow my brain the space to think the types of things that lead to big long tumblr posts about fishes. I don't draw for fun, I struggle to keep up with my pets. I couldn't breathe.

I referred to myself as having been traumatized after my PI stepped down, but its worse than I realized. The entire experience of working for him had a really terrible impact on me.

Maybe now that I am recovering and not directly under his influence (I haven't 100% escaped him, unfortunately) I'll crop up here occasionally again. Hopefully with interesting posts about fishes rather than the trauma of grad school.

I haven't posted here in a long time. It's because my doctoral studies took a nose dive - my PI I was so excited about stepped down as my advisor for discriminatory reasons. (He was consistently harsh and discriminatory from winter 2021 onwards, but he was the one to decide to drop me as a student. I would have stuck it out.)

I'm mastering out here under a different advisor, and having to start a project from scratch on a short deadline to do so. When I'm done I will have to start over on a PhD elsewhere. (The PI I was working with was the only one at this institution with the expertise I came here to learn, so I will be applying to other schools to join other labs that can teach me what I was looking for.)

I talk about being sick here, but I am much sicker than I let on to people, especially the people around me in my day to day life. I have chronic pain and an episodic illness - my conditions are invisible, all anyone sees is that I'm absent a lot but seem fine, "normal" in between episodes.

It's a balancing act of trying to seem sick enough to get people to actually give me the disability accommodations I'm legally entitled to while not seeming so sick that they try to decide for me what I'm capable of and hold me back from opportunities. (The reality being that I am sicker than I ever show but just push my body to do what I want anyways - which should be up to me to decide to do.) My previous PI both decided I wasn't sick enough to accept that my sick time wasn't me blowing off work for leisure and also decided that I was too much of a liability to be allowed into the field. Worst of both sides. It lead to me scrambling to work every waking moment I wasn't actively ill, with few opportunities to rest, and my health declining from overdoing it for months straight.

He drove my mental health into the ground on top of all this, which is why I've been absent here and in other spaces some of you might see me frequent.

Being sick is enough of a hurdle on its own, but on top of that people like me have to go through long difficult processes to get diagnoses and get formal accommodations, just for people around us to still decide to be discriminitory. And in academia, there's little avenue to fight this without sinking your own career in the process.

[narelleart]

In scientific names, if the specific epithet (the second half of the Genus + species binomial name) ends in an "i", that traditionally means the rest of the specific epithet preceeding the i is a man's name. (Women's names end in "ae". Not sure if a standard has been set for other gender identities, but this is based on masculine/feminine suffixes in latin so perhaps it could follow modern latin-derived languages' additions for neutral pronouns?)

This is something I learned and mostly adapted to, except there are a few names I learned early in my interest in fishes that are stuck in my head the way I originally misread them. I generally only realize the error when I try to say them aloud to someone who I talk science with.

(A particularly bad example:

Microsynodontis batesi

I read the epithet as "buh-tess-ee", its "Bates-eye".)

I thought I'd mostly shaken these, but just now I realized I still do one, and the whole hobby does it:

Pangio kuhli, "Kuhli loaches." It's even sometimes spelt "Coolie loach" in the hobby.

The name would actually be pronounced "Kuhl-eye".

I don't know if I could even change my pronunciation of this one at this point...

[narelleart]

I haven't posted here in a long time. It's because my doctoral studies took a nose dive - my PI I was so excited about stepped down as my advisor for discriminatory reasons. (He was consistently harsh and discriminatory from winter 2021 onwards, but he was the one to decide to drop me as a student. I would have stuck it out.)

I'm mastering out here under a different advisor, and having to start a project from scratch on a short deadline to do so. When I'm done I will have to start over on a PhD elsewhere. (The PI I was working with was the only one at this institution with the expertise I came here to learn, so I will be applying to other schools to join other labs that can teach me what I was looking for.)

I talk about being sick here, but I am much sicker than I let on to people, especially the people around me in my day to day life. I have chronic pain and an episodic illness - my conditions are invisible, all anyone sees is that I'm absent a lot but seem fine, "normal" in between episodes.

It's a balancing act of trying to seem sick enough to get people to actually give me the disability accommodations I'm legally entitled to while not seeming so sick that they try to decide for me what I'm capable of and hold me back from opportunities. (The reality being that I am sicker than I ever show but just push my body to do what I want anyways - which should be up to me to decide to do.) My previous PI both decided I wasn't sick enough to accept that my sick time wasn't me blowing off work for leisure and also decided that I was too much of a liability to be allowed into the field. Worst of both sides. It lead to me scrambling to work every waking moment I wasn't actively ill, with few opportunities to rest, and my health declining from overdoing it for months straight.

He drove my mental health into the ground on top of all this, which is why I've been absent here and in other spaces some of you might see me frequent.

Being sick is enough of a hurdle on its own, but on top of that people like me have to go through long difficult processes to get diagnoses and get formal accommodations, just for people around us to still decide to be discriminitory. And in academia, there's little avenue to fight this without sinking your own career in the process.

[narelleart]

A cool trait of this species is visible in this photo:

On the fish to the right, see how the tips of the rays on the first dorsal fin end in big knobs?

Those are egg-mimics.

Females of this species show a preference for males that have successfully spawned already and are safely guarding another female's eggs. They avoid inexperienced males that are likely to let their eggs get eaten.

So males developed these egg-mimic structures, so when they entice a female into their nest they can make it look like they've already had a successful spawn, even if they haven't, increasing the likelihood that the female will choose to stick around and mate with them.

Fantail Darters (Etheostoma flabellare) by Olaf Nelson Via Flickr: Fantail Darters (Etheostoma flabellare) from a small creek in Dubuque County, Iowa. Tributary to a tributary of the Mississippi River. Caught in a dipnet. Photographed in a photo tank in the rain. Cropped and adjusted in Photoshop (adjust contrast, etc.; color pretty much as in original shot).

[narelleart]

@aquadraco20 replied:

"Cant you report this somewhere? Doesnt this violate the endangered species act? Or local laws regarding endangered species? Maybe the local park ranger could do something?"

Unfortunately, no, it doesn't. In the U.S., imperiled species are only protected if they are federally listed (or listed within individual states) via the Endangered Species Act (U.S. native species) or listed via CITES (international species).

For international fish imports like these, we need to look at CITES Appendices I, II, and III. Note that the different appendices afford different levels of protection. For example, we still have tank-raised Hypancistrus zebra in the trade because they are only listed in Appendix III, but there are reports that Brazil is proposing elevating it up to Appendix I.

CITES lists very few fishes. They are upping the listed sharks, at least - see most subheadings under "CLASS ELASMOBRANCHII". This does include many freshwater rays. But very few freshwater bony fishes are listed, especially when you consider how massive that group is. I see a total of 12 freshwater bony fishes. (I am including anadromous/catadromous fishes as freshwater fishes here.)

When I say that these fishes are "critically endangered", I'm referring to a status assigned to them by the IUCN Red List.

Red List assessors, species experts that are often scientists, assess species and determine their conservation status, with the intent to try to assess as many species, globally, as possible. To my knowledge, this is the only international effort even considering which species might be under threat.

This list helps inform the other conventions and regulatory bodies, but in the U.S., it holds no power on its own.

These are not the only imperiled fishes in the aquarium trade, these are just some I am very familiar with. My Pseudomystus heokhuii are also listed as Endangered (listed since I got them), but I am still seeing them crop up more and more on online stock lists.

There are a lot of hobbyists that feel that having these fishes in the trade isn't a bad thing, because they are uncommonly imported so the hobby isn't the reason they are declining. They feel that the aquarium trade is just a drop in the bucket. It's true that, for both the Parosphromenus spp. and my Pseudomystus heokhuii, the real threat is habitat destruction for anthropogenic land use.

But I still don't like to see specimens going to brick and mortar stores where the customers who buy them won't know what they're getting and won't try to spawn them. Unfortunately, there's not really anything that can be done about it without federal regulation, which is unlikely to happen.

I visited a nearby city and stopped in a fish store that had four "species" of Parosphromenus (one undescribed, under a trade name).

I couldn't just leave, so I took home the pair they had of the species highest on the ranking list I'd made previously which also happened to be a critically endangered species. (Parosphromenus gunawani, if they were identified correctly. I'll sort it out when I get a chance to get a better look at them.)

I wish I could have taken the others too - some species had larger groups, and I would have bought every individual they had of any species I bought. But I wasn't prepared for that, I'm limited on tank space in my current living situation and only had one cycled filter ready.

All Parosphromenus are imperiled, they are endemic to niche specialized habitats that are under anthropogenic threat. They have no business in the aquarium trade, and certainly not in brick and mortar shops like this. Another customer was trying to get them to sell him moderately sized catfishes for his one gallon "tank". Anyone could walk in and buy these, with no intention of spawning them, no idea what they are.

I mentioned to the shop owner that they were imperiled and he clearly had no qualms about that, but was more so bothered that I brought it up.

The other Parosphromenus they had were:

P. nagyi

P. ornaticauda

P. sp. "Sentang"