Project Milestone #1 Complete!

Hello everyone! This is just a short lab note to let you all know that our first project milestone is complete.

As many of you know, I spent the last 4 months in Brazil on a Fulbright grant. While there my primary goal was collecting samples of tarpon and sawfish, with the goal of having sample collection complete by the time I returned. I can happily say that we have done that, and in the sawfish department we have outdone ourselves.

Tarpon

 

The season I was in Brazil turned out not to be the best season for collecting tarpon. In fact, right now is peak tarpon season. Despite that we have 24 tarpon samples, mostly of scales but also a few paired otoliths. We'll use those scale/otolith pairs to confirm our results, since the chemistry should match between both structures in the same fish.

We have much bigger plans though. I'll be sending out a protocol to researchers along the coast in Brazil to collect samples and send them to us. There seems to be quite a bit of interest in this work from my discussions with professors there. With some luck and a bit of attention to building this collaboration I think we can build a much larger sample set. But, for now, we have all the otoliths we need for this funding on Experiment.

Sawfish

 

Using a Dremel tool to remove a tooth sample from a donated rostrum (Orla Viva Museum)

My work with sawfish ended up being much more fruitful than I expected. Even though the Amazon region is considered one of their last refuges, sawfish are very rare. Also, because catching them is illegal and there is a significant black market, it can be tricky and even dangerous to start asking around among fisherman to find samples. Because of this my initial expectations were low.

But, there are lots of dried rostrum to be had. Many have been saved by private citizens who are interested in donating them to science. Many more have been saved by researchers.

I was lucky enough to find several researchers who were willing to donate a tooth from their collections of dried rostra. In all, we have 133 sawfish samples currently in our collection. These samples span locations from Maranhão in the south to the mouth of the Amazon river (both freshwater and brackish), as well as the state of Amapá to the north of the outlet of the Amazon river.

Our crowdfunding project will just scratch the surface of analyzing these samples, but the potential results are very exciting!

 

top view of rostrum after sampling a tooth

 

Bottom view of a sampled rostrum, showing the minimal damage of removing a tooth.

Where do we go from here?

The next steps are to import these samples from Brazil. Tarpon will likely be slightly easier as they are not protected in Brazil, though they are protected here in the US. Because sawfish are so deeply endangered we will need to prepare CITES export paperwork in both countries to import the samples. This may take some time but once we get the samples here we can start the process of analysis! Exciting stuff!