Long time SAIAB Honorary Research Associate, Dr Allan Connell, visits the Institute

We recently had the honour of being visited by Dr Allan Connell who has been an Honorary Research Associate for more than two decades.

Dr Connell’s relationship with relationship with SAIAB began back in the late 1980s when he was working at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) monitoring the impact of submarine outfalls on the marine environment of KwaZulu-Natal. “I was heading a team of chemists, bacteriologists and biologists and we would often find fish. We didn’t know what species they were and would send them to SAIAB for identification. Our work often involved aspects of Ichthyology, which helped to build a relationship with Phil and Elaine Heemstra together with Alan Whitfield,” he says.

Even though he did his PhD in Entomology, he had always been interested in fishing from a very young age. “After my retirement I started a culture of collecting and studying fish eggs. I collect, catalogue and identify these fish eggs. While doing this work, I came across eggs which I couldn’t identify and that’s around the time I went into DNA testing," he says. At the time there wasn’t much being done in this field in South Africa.

“I searched the internet and came across an article in New Scientist about a researcher at the University of Guelph in Canada, who was barcoding cryptic butterflies, to unravel the mystery of very distinguishable larvae on specific host plants giving rise to cryptic adults that few experts could tell apart by traditional taxonomy." He made contact with the scientist and asked whether it was possible to barcode some of his unknown species. He replied that they were in the process of sourcing funding for the launch of an international effort to barcode the fishes of the world. “They asked if I was willing to collect fish from South Africa and in exchange they would barcode my hatched larvae,"he says. Dr Connell then contacted SAIAB requesting permission to propose SAIAB as the Southern African representative on the barcoding team and his collaboration with SAIAB has taken various forms ever since.

Dr Connell doesn’t visit the Institute on a regular basis but keeps regular contact with Phil and Elaine. “I decided to come down because I had a lot of buckets and drums of species which I needed to get down here. I also came across two fish which seem to be new species. I’ve also brought some material for Phil and Elaine for the new Fishes of the Western Indian Oceans book," he says.

To see Dr Connell’s work please visit http://www.fisheggsandlarvae.com/