Electric signals produced by Africa’s freshwater mormyrid fishes are useful to fish taxonomists seeking to discover and describe the many still undocumented species in this group. However knowledge how to record and make use of these signals has been limited to a few specialists in the U.S. and Europe until now.
From Monday October 1 to Thursday October 4, 2018 the first teaching workshop of its kind on recording electric signals of these unusual fishes was held at the University of Lubumbashi’s Faculty of Agronomic Sciences. The twenty-one participants included sixteen ichthyologists from all corners of the D.R. Congo, two from the Republic of Congo and one from Burundi, South Africa, and Belgium, respectively. Some participants were students, others were researchers, instructors or professors at their home institutions.
The workshop was taught by Americans Carl D. Hopkins and John P. Sullivan from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Hopkins is Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University and Sullivan is a Curatorial Affiliate at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates. Sullivan had previously spent 10 months in Kisangani, D.R. Congo studying the fishes of the Congo River as a U.S. State Department Fulbright Research Scholar. They were invited to organize and teach the workshop by the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium as part of its MbiSa Congo project which is studying the fish fauna of 10 protected areas within the Congo Basin. “MbiSa” is a portmanteau of the words for fish in the two languages widely spoken in the basin: “mbisi” in Lingala and “samaki” in Swahili.
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