Finfish being identified
We’re always being told about the abundant animal and plant life in Belize, but getting the specifics isn’t all that easy. To get a more accurate picture of the types of fish in Belizeans waters scientists and volunteers have undertaken an ambitious project being sponsored by a variety of local and foreign agencies. News Five was at SJC for the facts on finfish.
“We in fish every day. We get things messier than that.”
Janelle Chanona
The biology lab at Saint John’s College usually smells like old bones and dust but for the past five days, it smelt really fishy.
During the last six months Belizean biologists and volunteers have been collecting over a hundred and fifty different species of fish. They hit the high seas, braved the fish markets and trekked through tangled mangroves, looking for any fish with fins. Last Friday they were joined by ichthyologists or “fish scientists” from as far away as Russia, Australia and South Africa who came to help them revise a twenty year old field guide of all the fishes in the Caribbean.
Kent Carpenter, Project Director
“We’ve learnt a lot about since the last twenty years about the fishes in the Caribbean and the experts have gone to a lot of trouble to revise certain families, certain genres, certain groups, and this information is now going to be put into the revised edition.”
The revised edition will also have some new additions.
Kent Carpenter
“We’re finding species that so far have not officially been recorded from Belize and this morning we got some very interesting news, it seems there’s one new species of fish which has been found specifically during the pre-workshop collecting for this so we have a new toadfish.”
The toadfish and the rest of the collection are going to remain in Belize. The location or curator for the collection has not been decided yet. Most of the information collected here will be transferred to database called Fishbase, which anyone can access through the Fisheries Department.
The project is being sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management, the CARICOM Fisheries Unit, Saint John’s College and the Fisheries Department. The closing ceremonies for the project will be held at the Belize Biltmore Plaza Hotel tomorrow.
