By Lazeena Yearwood
Some 659 fish species were found and documented during research efforts conducted in Guyana by foreign and local biologists and it is believed that this information can be used to inform governmental decisions about areas where fishes need to be protected.
The findings come after Donald Taphorn, a retired biologist from the United States of America, accompanied by a team of other researchers including Elford Liverpool, the head of the Department of Biology at the University of Guyana compiled, researched and documented the list of the fish species explored thus far.
Taphorn, in an interview with the News Room, explained that when he was an undergrad, his research began but this was to study the impact of the ornamental fish industry in South America.
“Basically, we found that there was very heavy mortality in the handling of the fishes but that impacts were localised…so that’s how I ended up going to Guyana the first time. We also made collections of the fishes in the places that we visited and I guess that’s when I started trying to identify them,” he said.
Since then, Taphorn, Liverpool and numerous other researchers and biologists combined their knowledge of fish to identify the over 600 species. But this is not all. The researchers suspect that there are over 200 species yet to be compiled as certain areas are not yet explored.
Though the research has taken years to compile, and samples were taken from several parts of Guyana, there is much more that can be done in this regard. The next phase would include creating maps to identify areas where one specie is highly populated.
A further step would be for the areas where the specie risks extension to be protected.
“To the average citizen whose only concern is what fish he wants to eat for supper, it probably isn’t that big of a deal but for scientists, it’s important to inform governmental decisions about where the biodiversity hot spots are in Guyana and which areas need to be protected,” the researcher said.
This research can greatly support the country’s biodiversity preservation plans. Human activities, especially mining, are altering river physio chemistry and geomorphology in Guyana. This is resulting in significant shifts in fish community structure, the research states.
While many fishes are mentioned in the article, the arapaima fish, widely sought for its meat, is endangered. But there’s more, Taphorn said.
“We used to think that the arapaima in South America is just one species but recently work by Dr Donald Stewart and his student and Leslie De Souza, they have been studying the arapaima in Guyana and it turns out that it’s a different species. So that one is critically endangered because it is reduced to probably just several thousand fish that are heavily exploited because they are really tasty.”
To add to the uses of the list, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has already started using the list to include the species that are listed that they didn’t have on their list of fish species in Guyana.
The document can be found at https://bioone.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-academy-of-natural-sciences-of-philadelphia/volume-168/issue-1
