Overview

The rivers of Colombia are a treasure trove of potential ichthyological research and discovery, yet field work in this beautiful and biodiverse country has long been very dangerous even for local biologists because various armed groups occupied much of the countryside and prohibited outsiders. Fortunately, one of the main rabel groups signed a peace agreement in 2016 and agreed to give up their arms, thus opening vast portion of Colombia once again to scientific study. Shortly after this, I began planning fieldwork in collaboration with Colombian ichthyologists Armando Ortega-Lara, who works for the INCIVA institute in Cali, and Francisco Villa, who is a professor at the University of Tolima in Ibague. In late July and early August 2017, I joined Armando, two of Francisco Villa's students (Cristhian Conde and Gian Carlo Sánchez), and Peruvian ichthyologist Vanessa Meza on an expedition to survey rivers draining various parts of the Andes Mountains in southern Colombia. We began our trip in Cali, which is in the Cauca River watershed (major tributary of the Magdalena River) then traveled NW to Buenaventura on the Pacific Coast. Along the Pacific Coast of Colombia, we sampled the Calima River (San Juan River watershed), the Dagua River, and the Patia River. From the Pacific Coast, we traveled to Popayán in the upper Magdalena, then over 3,000 m asl passes in the Eastern Cordillera before descending into headwaters of the Caqueta River, a major tributary of the northwestern Amazon basin. Among many incredible highlights of this trip was the opportunity to collect at the type localities for almost a dozen different fish species that had been described more than a century ago. Fresh tissues, specimens, and live photographs of such species from their type locality can be incredibly valuable for taxonomic revisions and are often essential when trying to identify or describe a related species even from many thousands of miles away. Most important for my research was the collection of fresh tissues, specimens and live photographs of eight species Chaetostoma (Ch. anale, Ch. breve, Ch. leucomelas, Ch. milesi, Ch. palmeri, Ch. patiae, Ch. platyrhynchus and Ch. thomsoni), and two species of Cordylancistrus, one of which appears to be undescribed (Co. daguae, Co. n.sp. Dagua). Overall, the trip was a tremendous success, and I look forward conducting more fieldwork with my Colombian colleagues in the future!