Catching rays (not the solar kind) in South America
I was exceedingly lucky to be invited on my first trip to South America by my advisor Nathan Lovejoy and my committee member, Hernán López-Fernández, the curator of fishes at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). I was introduced to Guyana, the land of many waters, which lies on the northern coast of South America along the southern Caribbean.
![](https://d3t9s8cdqyboc5.cloudfront.net/images?path=50023/AbVVGv3rQXSXlJuyC0hl_guyana.jpg&width=650&height=)
Guyana is fascinating because it contains animals and plants that have been historically separated from the greater Amazon (Peru, Brazil) and Orinoco (Colombia, Venezuela) rivers and their localized fauna & flora. Guyana has the famous tepuis, or table-top mountains made famous in Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World.'
I've been back to Guyana several times, and I'm always stunned by it's intrinsic natural beauty. This past year I led an expedition to the Demerara River to provide fisheries and biodiversity information for the local government, most importantly catalog fish biodiversity, and finally - collect stingrays for my PhD research. And that's where I found this beauty:
![](https://d3t9s8cdqyboc5.cloudfront.net/images?path=50023/noQM8QsKQz6jRXwiZh12_Potamotrygon%20cf%20demerarae.jpg&width=650&height=)
The species of Potamotrygon, a river ray, is new to science but shares a close relationship with the related insect-feeding specialist stingray, Potamotrygon orbignyi and a little-known stingray from the Marowijne River in Suriname, Potamotrygon marinae. I found these little beauties actually in the same part of the river, the estuary, as some related (and not so closely related) marine stingrays, Himantura, the chupare 'whiprays' and the little-known, Dasyatis geijskesi.
![](https://d3t9s8cdqyboc5.cloudfront.net/images?path=50023/YncBNHUSYqRA0mQkOvQB_Dgeijskesi.jpg&width=650&height=)
It is remarkable to me that animals still exist that are unknown to science. A good deal of the research and field work I've done in the last few years, as well as tireless efforts from other researchers like Nathan Lujan and Donald Taphorn, not to mention Hernán himself - have put the ROM as one of the best catalogs of Guiana Shield fish biodiversity. And this is critical to preserving and understanding biodiversity - because the first step is simply knowing what animals live where.
My fieldwork has also taken my to the headwaters of the Amazon in Peru, as well as central America, like Costa Rica - in search of new species and more information on their whereabouts, ecology, and evolutionary past.
0 comment