This is from
Les Kaufman,
Biology Professor at Boston University,
who is doing major research on the cichlids of Lake Victoria.
here is my story insofar as it has anything to do
with "Darwin's Nightmare".
I'm a professor in the Biology Department here at BU. I used to run the
research programs at the New England Aquarium, and I'm still affiliated there.
I'm also a fellow at Harvard where my dead fish are (in the MCZ fish
collection). Harvard actually played a huge role in the backstory for Hubert's
film. My Harvard colleagues have been incredibly supportive of the Lake
Victoria fish research for nearly a quarter century now, and I hope they all
come to Hubert's screening at Harvard on the 12th. In fact, I'd like to go
over to that one, too, if only to see the film again.
I began working on a group of fishes called cichlids as a teenager- the tilapia
you buy in the supermarket now is a big African cichlid. In the late 70's I
started working on cichlids from Lake Victoria while I was at Johns Hopkins,
then I went to Harvard (Karel Liem's laboratory) in 1980 to do my post-doctoral
research on them. I guess that Karel is my cichlid father, though actual
cichlid fathers tend to have thousands of babies by scores of mothers, and try
with great vigor to eat them at every opportunity. Karel will have something
to say about this. BTW- Karel, Karsten and George- please make sure everybody
in the Fish Department goes to see Hubert's film when it airs at Harvard on
Saturday. Richard, Fred, Tom, and Michael- can we publicize the BU showing on
Friday night (the 11th) around the Department- (SEE BU DETAILS AT END OF
EMAIL).
By 1985 everybody knew about how the introduction of Nile perch to Lake
Victoria was thought to be the main thing threatening hundreds of species of
cichlids that lived in that lake and nowhere else. In 1987 I started a captive
breeding program for endangered Lake Victoria cichlids and other fishes at the
New England Aquarium. We started an official studbook in 1989, and then
graduated to an international "Species Survival Plan" under American Zoo and
Aquarium and IUCN auspices in 1994. Of course, breeding little fishes in
aquariums does not by itself do them or Africa any good. So, in 1989 NOAA
supported me to join my first expedition to Lake Victoria to do research with
African colleagues to figure out what made the lake go haywire. Which by then,
it truly had. The team consisted of the lead scientist Bill Cooper from
Michigan State, Peter Kilham from the University of Michigan (and the world's
expat expert on Lake Victoria), Bob Hecky now of the University of Winnipeg
(Bob was not on this particular trip), Moshe Gophen from Israel's limnological
observatory in Haifa, Bill Robinson (then in my lab at NEAq but now a big shot
at UMass Boston), Peter Ochumba of the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Department
lab in Kisumu, and me. I was actually there almost completely by accident, but
that is another story.
Peter Kilham died two days after we arrived in Kisumu. That, too, is a story
in itself. The night he died Bill Cooper (who was Peter's best friend), handed
responsibility for the NOAA work in Lake Victoria to me. Also, our underwater
robot (ROV), named "Schnauzer", was impounded by Kenyan customs and we couldn't
pay them enough to let it out so we could walk it in the lake and see what was
going on. But while our two Bill's fought with the American Embassy in Kenya
to keep them from very crudely informing Peter's wife that he had died and
presenting her with a bill- which was the Vice Consul's intent- Moshe, Peter
Ochumba, and I carried on and went out on the lake in Peter Kilham's honor with
nothing but some holey nets and an instrument called a Hydrolab, which you use
to measure oxygen content and other things about water chemistry. On that trip
we discovered that all but the surface of the world's second largest lake now
had too little oxygen in its water to support fish life, or much of anything
else for that matter, except for bacteria and worms and some very strange
shrimp. That was when we first realized that the silver flecks all over the
bottom of the lake that the first expedition had seen from the ROV two years
earlier, were actually millions upon millions of dead fishes, killed when the
anoxic water periodically sloshed up into the shallows where they were hanging
out.
Well, to make a long story short, Peter Ochumba and I became very close
friends, Lake Victoria became my life, and I organized and led the Lake
Victoria Research Team through many trips to East Africa from 1990-1996. In
1990 I was awarded one of the first Pew Scholarships in Conservation and the
Environment (now the Pew Marine Fellows) for this work, and used the money to
fill the entire basement of my house with fish tanks and Lake Victoria cichlids
so I could learn to identify them and study them all night, which thrilled my
wife no end. My mentor in this effort was Dr. Humphry Greenwood of the British
Museum. Humphry wrote the book on the endemic (found nowhere else) cichlid
fishes of Lake Victoria, making them world famous as the freshwater version of
the Galapagos Islands, but as it turned out, he only knew of about 120 species
and there later turned out to be about 600 or so all told, most still
undescribed. I've discovered several score of these but my Dutch colleagues
have wracked up hundreds, and now finally our African students are working on
them.
The LVRT swelled to about 70 scientists- 20 expats and 50 Africans- and we
launched innumerable expeditions out onto the lake and off into the hinterlands
of Uganda and Kenya, and with our Dutch and Tanzanian colleagues whose team was
called HEST, in Tanzania, too. As the LVRT we got research support from the
National Science Foundation, National Geographic, Boston's Conservation Food
and Health Foundation, of course the New England Aquarium, and many other
generous sources in Europe and North America. The New England Aquarium did a
big exhibit about the LVRT, with support from the National Science Foundation,
with the story of the lake told in the exhibit by our African colleagues from
the three fishery research institutes. We had a big international meeting back
in 1992 in Jinja, Uganda, that led ultimately to a 77 million dollar World
Bank-led Global Environment Facility grant to the East African region, to
restore the ecology and fisheries of Lake Victoria. What happened to that
money is, once again, another story. Along the way Peter Ochumba died of
lymphoma in 1994. (Seven LVRT-associated scientists have contracted lymphoma or
leukemia, including me...apparently just an odd coincidence). My Dutch
colleague Dr. Kees Barel (several of our LVRT colleagues are from the
University of Leiden)- Kees has a taste for the maudlin- anyway he made a list
of all of the terrible things that happened to researchers on Lake Victoria and
declared the existence of a "Curse of Lake Victoria". Another of my Dutch HEST
colleagues and a great all-around guy, Dr. Tijs Goldschmidt, wrote a wonderful
book about the Lake Victoria cichlids, entitled "Darwin's Dreampond". I'm
pretty sure that this inspired the title of Hubert's film, "Darwin's
Nightmare".
I moved to BU in 1994, in the BU Marine Program ("BUMP"). There is now a Lake
Victoria Fisheries Organization (LVFO) and a Lake Victoria Environmental
Management Project (LVEMP), both run by African scientists and bureaucrats,
uniting the three nations of East Africa. Soon after the World Bank grant came
through, the East African Community re-formed (it had been torn assunder by Idi
Amin), adopting Lake Victoria as its logo. The officers in Arusha explained
patiently to me that I should now arrange for them to get the 77 million
dollars, since, after all, the lake was their logo. I like to think that maybe
we played a small part in resurrecting the East African Community. EAC did not
get the Lake Victoria grant, though. We actually are not really sure who did,
though clearly some of the money got LVFO and LVEMP going. Also many Land
Rovers appeared in front of the fishery research institutes, and we used them
to good effect along with whatever other effects they might have been having.
We trained a few good African ichthyologists and limnologists (fish and lake
scientists) though, and one, William Ojwang, is now completing his doctorate in
my lab here at BU. If nothing else, the glory days of fish and lake research
on Lake Victoria were resurrected, it helped a bunch of our young colleagues,
and that's okay.
Hubert somehow located me a few years ago when he decided to do a film about
Lake Victoria, and we met in Cambridge, and found that we really liked each
other. I did what I could to help Hubert with contacts, scientific background,
and such. We have kept in touch by email and phone, and Hubert called a few
times as he journeyed back and forth to Africa to do the film. Of course, the
story of the film is much bigger than the little fishes. I was horrified to
learn form Hubert's lurid tales, that I had dedicated fifteen years of my life
to maintaining a fishery and helping people, only to learn that the proceeds of
this fishery were indirectly contributing to human misery all over Africa. It
was shocking...but not really surprising. It is hard to explain how such
things happen except to people who know and love Africa.
I was last in Africa in 2000 because of my illness, though I spend many hours
each week studying the fishes, advising my students, and working with expat and
African colleagues. Besides my students, I have two very close friends, Drs.
Lauren and Colin Chapman, who have along with Dr. Ole Seehausen pretty much
been carrying the flag for the expat contingent of the old LVRT. We're still
getting a lot done, actually, and we still do not understand Lake Victoria, let
alone the human drama yet unfolding all about it.
This will be my first viewing of "Darwin's Nightmare".
--Les Kaufman
_________________
Ned
unclenedsfishfactory@gmail.com
508 533 5969
>>={{{{{{{{{{{{{{(°/)
FAQ
Register
Login
