Re: [GSAS-board] I wrote this article for GSAS Northwest Aquaria newsletter

[Paul Wallace <pwallace@u.washington.edu>]

Lawrence:

Your membership is in the system with a paper newsletter mailed to "3009 NW 
45th ST".  Your email address is listed as lawkentnorton@yahoo.com and I just 
set you to receive the email newsletter.  I look forward to reading though your 
article and viewing the numerous attached images.  The club at large is the 
best place for fish species ID and you are able to now post jpg to the mailing 
list.

-Paul

On Thu, 1 May 2008, Lawrence Kent wrote:

> Dear Steev and Paul,
>
> I wrote this article for your consideration for publication in the
> Northwest Aquaria newsletter.  I am also submitting it for my old club's
> newsletter (The Darter) back in St. Louis.  I just got back to Seattle
> last night, so I haven't downloaded my photos yet, but I will send you a
> few of those in the next couple of days or so.  Since paying my
> membership fee to GSAS about 3 months ago, I haven't received a copy of
> the newsletter. Has there been a period of non-publication or did my
> name/address fail to make it onto the distribution list?
>
> Also, I have a good powerpoint presentation on my past collecting trips
> to the Niger river in Mali, to Lake Tanganyika, and to Lake Malawi. I
> could also assemble one on the Lake Victoria Basin.  I would be happy to
> make a presentation on these trips to GSAS someday at a meeting, if you
> don't have a better alternative. And since I live in Freemont, there are
> no expenses to cover! Let me know. <<victoria basin cichlid visit
> article.doc>>
>
> Also, if you have any feedback on this article, please send, as I am
> keen to learn and improve.  I look forward to your response.
>
> Yours,
> Lawrence Kent
> Lawrence Kent
> Tel: (206) 709-3433
>
>
> From Seattle to Uganda via St. Louis: Seeking and Finding Lake Victoria
> Cichlids
>
> April 26, 2008
>
> I'm writing this article from my hotel room in Entebbe, Uganda, just a
> hundred yards from Lake Victoria, one of Africa's biggest lakes and home
> to hundreds of species of cichlids.  I am here on a two-week business
> trip, which luckily included a weekend available to look for fish.  This
> time I decided to travel a hundred miles or so north of Lake Victoria to
> visit some of the satellite lakes of its basin, rather than visit the
> Lake itself.  I'll tell you why in a few paragraphs, but first let me
> tell you about my last short trip to Lake Victoria, about six weeks ago.
>
> It was also a business trip, this time to Uganda's capital Kampala to
> launch a new project to develop drought-tolerant corn varieties for
> African farmers. On my last day in the country, a Sunday, I decided to
> hire a car and head down to Lake Victoria to look for some of its famous
> cichlids before going to the airport that night.  Situated at the border
> between Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, the lake is about 240 miles long
> and 190 miles wide.  It is inhabited by an estimated 600 species of
> cichlids, most of which were originally classified in the Haplochromis
> genus but subsequently were split into several genera, such as
> Harpagochromis, Lipochromis, Astatotilapia, and Pundamilia.  Fifty years
> ago there were an estimated one thousand species in the lake, but some
> 200 of these are thought to have been extirpated by the Nile perch,
> which feeds on cichlids and can grow to six feet in length.  The Nile
> Perch was introduced into the Lake in the 1950s for commercial fishing
> purposes and multiplied quickly in the 1980s. Other cichlid species may
> have been wiped out by the deterioration in water quality caused by
> sediment runoff caused by erosion along the lake's largely deforested
> banks. The water along the shoreline is pretty muddy.
>
> Once my car reached those muddy shores, I realized my dip net would be
> useless, and I was reluctant to wade into the lake, because of the
> reported presence of the parasitic worms that cause a nasty disease
> called schistosomiasis, or bilharzia. I negotiated with some boys to
> take me out in their wooden canoe to try our luck with their hooks,
> worms, and line, which was tied to empty water bottles that served as
> both rods and reels.  We saw some beautiful birds, but caught nothing.
> After an hour we returned to land and made further inquiries of the
> locals, showing them pictures of the Haplochromines in my Barron's book
> "Lake Victoria Basin Cichlids" to facilitate communications. We got a
> tip to drive to the nearby town of Bugonga where we could find more
> fishermen.  Arriving there and sharing the pictures in the book, I was
> quickly invited to sit in a larger canoe along with two locals who
> paddled us hard about a mile into the lake, where they located a
> home-made buoy to which was tied a jerry can filled with water suspended
> a meter below the surface. They pulled it up and then pulled from it
> about a dozen Haplochromine cichlids. They'd been storing them there,
> live, for later use as bait to catch...Nile perch.  These cichlids were
> dark blue, some with red fins, some with barring - not spectacular, but
> pretty handsome. It is extremely hard to identify Victorian cichlids to
> the species level because there are so many, there are so many that are
> undescribed, and those that are described are often distinguished by
> bone and teeth structures that are hard to see outside of a dissection
> laboratory.  But most of these guys looked like the Paralabidochromis
> sp. Rock Kribensis pictured on page 44 of that Barron's book.  I left
> some money with the fishermen on the shore and asked them if they could
> round up a few more cichlids for me while I headed off to Mbamba island
> for a few hours to visit the chimpanzee sanctuary there.
>
> When I returned to Bugonga later that afternoon, they had a couple dozen
> Haplochromines to show me.  Most seemed to be Rock Kribensis but there
> may also have been some Haplochromis limax and Astatotilapia sp. Red
> Tail.  I was able to bring a half dozen juveniles home, giving five to
> my friend Cory in St. Louis and saving one for my living room tank in
> Seattle.  It'll be interesting to see how they color up as they grow.
> I'm counting on Cory to breed them and let us know how things develop,
> maybe in an article in about ten months?
>
> Well, that trip was fun, but I wanted to do better on this second visit,
> especially after I read the Barron's book more carefully and realized
> that many of the more spectacularly colored Lake Victoria Basin cichlids
> aren't easily found in the Lake itself anymore, but are more likely to
> be found in the nearby satellite lakes.  I emailed a Ugandan travel
> agent and told him I wanted to visit Lake Nawampasa over the weekend,
> because this tiny lake seemed to be mentioned the most frequently in the
> Barron's book.  The agent booked me an old Land Cruiser and a room in a
> tiny inn in the small town of Pallisa about five hours northeast of
> Kampala.
>
> Upon arrival, my Ugandan driver (Sanyo) and I started asking around to
> get directions to Lake Nawampasa, which the travel agent had said was
> just 20 miles from Pallisa.  But nobody seemed to have heard of Lake
> Nawampasa.  Luckily we bumped into an outgoing young Ugandan from the
> region who convinced us to visit an alternative lake nearby that he
> assured us was filled with "nkedge" - the local name for all small
> cichlids.  We asked him to join us, and George Ouze jumped into our car
> and guided us another 15 miles down a dirt road through a landscape of
> traditional mud huts and papyrus swamps to a small, reed-lined lake he
> called "Daraja" but we later learned is more formally known as Gigati.
>
> We negotiated with the locals a fee of 20,000 Ugandan shillings (about
> $13) for some help and the right to pull some fish from their lake,
> mainly to photograph and then return them to their home.  A few minutes
> later, four men were dragging my minnow seine a few yards off shore and
> catching dozens of juvenile cichlids for their photo sessions.  Many of
> these were tilapia (probably niloticus) but many were Haplochromines,
> showing eggspots on their anal fins and hints of color, but too young to
> be identified, except for one that was canary yellow with bright blue
> lips and a red and blue dorsal fin - the Dwarf Victorian Mouthbrooder,
> Pseudocrenilabrus multicolor victoriae.  We realized that if we wanted
> to see more color we'd need to find adult fish, not just juveniles, so
> we hopped into one of the locals' leaky canoes and headed out through
> the reeds into the lake.
>
> We were intercepted on our way by another canoe coming in, its driver
> holding in one hand his paddle and in the other a plastic bowl filled
> with cichlids - samples that he'd quickly caught for us once he realized
> what we were after.  Seeing the diverse set of colorful fish in his
> bowl, I yelped with delight -- this trip was not going to disappoint!
> Although I couldn't be sure of my identifications, there seemed to be
> Xystichochromis phytophagus, which is called the Christmas Fulu in the
> hobby because of its bright red and green colors (actually
> yellowish-green) and Xystichochromis sp. All Red and "Haplochromis" sp.
> Ruby, both of which have bright, bright red caudal and anal fins along
> with bright splashes of red and yellow on their flanks and dorsals.  The
> local fisherman explained that he'd caught them on hook and line using
> worms for bait.
>
> Once we penetrated the reeds in our canoe, we paddled over to a series
> of other canoes, each occupied by a pair of small boys fishing for
> "nkedge" using primitive fishing poles. As we pulled along side them
> we'd peer into their canoes to find the floors littered with dozens of
> freshly caught, dead and dying cichlids, many of them spectacularly
> colored.  The locals explained that they ate these little fish, almost
> all of them less than 4 inches in length, boiled or grilled, mixed with
> "G-nut" sauce (groundnuts or peanuts).  It was the kids' job to catch
> them, one at a time, but they were easy to catch and twenty could be
> hooked in an hour.  We "rescued" the most beautiful and interesting and
> still living ones from the boys' boats and put them in our bucket to
> bring back to shore for photographing and attempts at identification.
> The Astatotilapia latifasciata (Zebra Obliquidens) were the easiest to
> i.d. because of their distinct thick black barring on yellow flanks and
> rosy cheeks.  The ones with the classic Happlochromine shape and super
> red dorsal, anal, and caudal fins may have been "Happlochromis" sp.
> Cherry Fin.  The big-mouthed six-inch predator was shaped like the
> Harpagochromis mentatus in the Barron's book and probably belonged to
> that genus.   The five-inch laterally-compressed Pyxichromis orthostoma
> was relatively easy to identify because of its distinct Altolamprologus
> calvus-like body shape and cavernous upturned mouth.  According to
> Barrons, this species is an ambush predator that roams freely through
> the plants and open, sandy areas.  Another species we found among the
> boys' catch was Lipochromis sp. Parvidens shovelmouth, which is
> distinguishable because of its protruding mouth and concave forehead.
> Barrons says that this fish is paedophorous, consuming baby fish and
> embryos by forcibly sucking them from the mouths of brooding
> Haplochromines. That doesn't sound very nice.
>
> We spent about four hours at that lake, before handing out about $30 in
> tips to the dozen or so locals who helped us at our task, and driving
> back to Pallisa, covered in mud with a half dozen unidentifiable
> juvenile fish.  The inn didn't have electricity or even any coffee, but
> it had good mosquito nets, and I slept well after looking at the hundred
> or so new photos of fish stored in my digital camera.
>
> The next morning Sanyo, George and I took off at 6:30 a.m., determined
> to find someone who could help us find Lake Nawampasa, or at least
> someone who'd heard of it.  It turned out to be an incredible search,
> full of twists and turns, and I didn't get back to Entebbe until 10:30
> that night, sunburned and filthy.  I'll tell that part of the story
> another day. It's time to go to bed.  God bless you and your fish.
>
>
>
>
>


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