Aquarium Hobbyist turned Systematic Ichthyologist

Hello tumblr! My name is Angela and I mostly use this space to talk about fish. [32, she/her] ~ Check out my pinned post for more about me and my background!

[narelleart]

Pinned Post!

Hi!

I’m Angela, though I go by “Narelle” in most spaces online. Feel free to call me by either one.

I’m 32 and use she/her.

This is technically my personal/art blog, but over the course of my time on tumblr, more and more of my life has begun to revolve around fish and science, so that’s most of what I blog about nowadays. I am a systematic ichthyologist and aquarium hobbyist. My favorite broad groups are the catfishes (Siluriformes) and Southeast Asian freshwater fishes. More specifically, I absolutely love Bagrid catfishes and keep a very small collection of them.

As a scientist, my research interests are focused on understanding phylogenetic relationships among the Siluriformes, investigating common morphological adaptations to extreme acidity in fishes and how those adapations are distributed across the phylogeny, and taxonomic description of new species.

For context, since it comes up a lot in my posts, my background:

I was previously a full-time professional aquarist at a small public aquarium, where I was responsible for the care of the park’s elasmobranchs, bony fishes, invertebrates, herpetofauna, and pelicans. Most of my time was spent with those first three, especially the elasmobranchs.

I have a B.S. in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, in the Fisheries option. This degree was the first step in switching career paths from being an aquarist to becoming a researcher.

I recently defended my M.S. student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, studying systematic ichthyology.

As of Fall 2024, I've started in a new PhD program. I am studying my favorite fishes and the topics that most excite me!

I’m always down to talk about fish, but I can be hit or miss with responses. School keeps me very busy and I have a chronic illness that causes me to fall behind on everything in life with little notice. Apologies if I fail to respond to something you’ve sent! Feel free to give me an extra nudge if it’s been awhile and you’d like a response. I respond best to direct @’s on posts, for whatever reason.

[narelleart]

Actually I have had a couple reminders of tumblr recently.

In January, Emily Graslie of The Brain Scoop was the plenary speaker at a collections themed breakout meeting of one of my professional societies that was hosted here at my institution. She talked about her backstory and start in museum collections and how that grew into her career in science communications.

But she got her start here on tumblr! Posting specimen pics! Absolutely wild. I checked, I unfortunately was not following her back in the day and she's taken down her original tumblr content. But I followed so many blogs like that back when I was active here. I wonder how many are in this museum collections sphere I work in now?

(My PhD is in our university museum - my lab and office are in the museum itself, and I work in our research collection. I'm fully a museum person now. 💪)

[narelleart]

I will do specimen pics when I get a chance, I have had health stuff come up and get in the way. 💀

[narelleart]

Actually I have had a couple reminders of tumblr recently.

In January, Emily Graslie of The Brain Scoop was the plenary speaker at a collections themed breakout meeting of one of my professional societies that was hosted here at my institution. She talked about her backstory and start in museum collections and how that grew into her career in science communications.

But she got her start here on tumblr! Posting specimen pics! Absolutely wild. I checked, I unfortunately was not following her back in the day and she's taken down her original tumblr content. But I followed so many blogs like that back when I was active here. I wonder how many are in this museum collections sphere I work in now?

(My PhD is in our university museum - my lab and office are in the museum itself, and I work in our research collection. I'm fully a museum person now. 💪)

[narelleart]

My undergrad friend who works in my museum with me has reminded me of tumblr today. (She had a class assignment to find a tumblr post and linguistically analyze it?)

But its made me feel nostalgic for the tumblr days. Perhaps I'll go back to occasionally yelling into the void here like I used to. Will probably clean some stuff up if I do, though. It is my nightmare that professional connections would find this space full of oversharing about my medical struggles and arguing about controversial fish opinions.

But before I potentially scrub all that stuff, for my old tumblr friends, health update:

I have a cyst in my brain that could potentially be the source of my illness. Jury's out on how much it is to blame and if we're going to get rid of it or no.

[narelleart]

My undergrad friend who works in my museum with me has reminded me of tumblr today. (She had a class assignment to find a tumblr post and linguistically analyze it?)

But its made me feel nostalgic for the tumblr days. Perhaps I'll go back to occasionally yelling into the void here like I used to. Will probably clean some stuff up if I do, though. It is my nightmare that professional connections would find this space full of oversharing about my medical struggles and arguing about controversial fish opinions.

But before I potentially scrub all that stuff, for my old tumblr friends, health update:

I have a cyst in my brain that could potentially be the source of my illness. Jury's out on how much it is to blame and if we're going to get rid of it or no.

[narelleart]

I recently attended the 2024 All-Aquarium Catfish convention.

Those that know me will remember this as an event I attend regularly. It's held every two years. Last year was the last time the original club in the DC area was willing to host it (2022 was their 9th one), but the Tropical Fish Club of Burlington agreed to take it on this year to keep the tradition alive. (They only agreed to take on for just this year, but it sounds like someone will continue it again in 2026.)

It was great to see familiar faces again and meet new ones. I really love talking to hardcore hobbyists, especially catfish people. Compared to the scientific conferences I'm going to nowadays, hobby conventions really just hit different. A scientific conference is still a work event, so networking and appearances are still a big deal even if the people are chill. A hobby convention is just pure unbridled love of the fishes and the hobby as a whole. Catfish hobbyists, more than anyone else, really are my people.

TFCB did a great job with their first Catcon. My only major complaint is the same one I always have: It was too short! I wish I had another day or two to hang out with my cool fish people.

I might start giving some talks for clubs and conventions going forward. 🤔 I had some invites. Keep an eye out on speaker lists for events like this!

[narelleart]

When I held these fishes in my hands it brought tears to my eyes.

(Left: Nanobagrus immaculatus; Right, Nanobagrus nebulosus)

[narelleart]

Came across a paper on domestic goldfish that showed the same thing I've been saying this whole time - these short bodied breeds have been bred to extremes, causing disfigurements that impair them. This study (Le Verger et al, 2024) showed reductions in brain size, modification of weberian ossicles (used for hearing in otophysan fishes), and reductions of the swim bladder (including near or complete loss of the posterior chamber in some breeds). But it also had citations I want to go back and read about things like lack of space for organs, propencity for infections, and loss of vertebrae.

I'll have to read up and do a longer writeup with full citations sometime, after things settle down. If I remember. ^^;;

Anyways, in the mean time:

Science agrees - "fancy" shortbodied goldfish breeds push their morphology to extremes at the expense of their health and ability to behave naturally.

[narelleart]

I'm absolutely obsessed with my current D&D character which is great for D&D but it makes it hard to focus on work sometimes. I super need to write my thesis whoops.

So anyways let me tell you about my dumb clown son.

This is Pascal:

I've found a love for medival clown fashion design? Pascal likes to sew and designs his own costumes so I get to draw lots of fun clothes for him. He makes them all kind of modular so he can mix and match pieces and be dressed differently every day.

Here's some more of his outfits. This one was party wear, for a masquerade:

We recently got winter gear which he dismantled and turned into clowny stuff, so here's his winter outfit:

I forgot his necklace and didn't color the earring in the winter one, but I was slapping this together in a rush to be able to show my party what I did with the nice practical warm weather gear they bought for me. ^^;;

Odds are low my party will ever see this, but just in case - MASSIVE SPOILERS below the cut! Pascal's got hella secrets!

Pascal has spent his life as a clown to hide that he is actually a tiefling. He is the son of a half elf and the archdevil Levistus (though he has no idea who his dad is), so he claims he is a half elf and does all he can to hide his tiefling traits. His horns are very short and about the same color as his hair, so he can just tease his hair really big and/or wear a hat to hide those. His tail he binds to his leg then hides that under poofy shorts. Exposed white except for his face and ears in the above images is all fabric (long gloves and stockings), and his face and ears are covered in thick makeup. He's blue, actually.

-cut-

All party members gone? Good.

Like this:

My party has just arrived at our first major plot destination and it's turned out to be a place cursed by Levistus. The rest of the party has only had fairly vague allusions to this and doesn't know Levistus has anything to do with me (all they know is Pascal is a clown and probably a half elf or something). To be fair, it's not like Pascal knows he has anything to do with Levistus either.

(His secrets come in layers, so there's more to uncover down the line. 1. He's a tiefling. 2. His dad's Levistus. 3. His mother's curse is from her trying to break a pact with Levistus, which he was supposed to be the payment for - as a warrior for Levistus to do his bidding in the material plane.)

The party has been super nice and respectful of Pascal's quirks and dodginess (he will only sleep alone, in his own tent or a separate room; he doesn't eat in front of them; if he gets cuts he gets away from them and focuses on stitching up his clothes and ignores the bleeding). It's very sweet but it means they take zero bait to be nosy about what his deal is.

So my DM has checked with me about setting something up to expose his secrets in some way? I'm excited. 👀 Can't wait for the party to realize he's a liar. He's going to be so upset, it'll be great.

[a-book-of-creatures]

I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

[markscherz]

This is the hot tumblr discourse that I’m here for.

[narelleart]

Oh also there's potential for the work I'm doing to reveal a massive conservation bluder being actively made by government fish and wildfe management agencies here in the US. 😬 More to come on that if I can confirm my suspicions.

But its got me wondering about the biggest modern conservation blunders? Anyone know any they can share?

I'm talking about actions taken as a positive step towards conservation (especially if trying to conserve imperiled species) that turned out to have the opposite effect. Not so much the dumb stuff humans did back in the day for other motives, like hunting species to extinction or introducing invasives because we wanted them around for food.

[narelleart]

Hm, I think I need a new header line for my tumblr. I think I can call myself a systematic ichthyologist now. I'm not really an "ichthyologist in the making" anymore, though I'm still learning.

[narelleart]

All my deadlines are fast approaching. 💀

I need to get my proposal formally submitted by next week, then be done with the whole actual thesis by the end of the month. Defend early June. Conference mid July. Move before the end of summer?? Start the new PhD late August?

I just finished the proposal, other than any last minute revisions I need to make after my committee reviews it, so that's one thing done. But I'm still actively collecting data and adding more specimens?? So much work left to do. 💀 So little time.

But I expect to describe several species based on this work I've been doing so there's that.

[narelleart]

Oh! I just realized I never posted updates. It looks like the last anyone here heard about my academic pursuits was still mostly about recovering from my traumatic experience with my original PI.

My PI that I am doing the MS with is excellent, a fantastic mentor. I'm really happy to have gotten to work with her. She was exactly who I needed coming out of that bad situation.

If all goes well, I should be defending my MS thesis early this summer. Afterwards I'm scheduled to attend a conference and present on the same project.

I have been accepted to a new PhD program starting Fall 2024, so I'll also be moving again this summer. The PI I will be working with there is great. I think this time I'll have both a good research fit and a good mentorship fit. We already planned my dissertation chpaters out during recruitment (this usually happens over the course of your first year of the program so big deal that we knocked it out before even being officially admitted) and discussed making trips to Southeast Asia to sample fishes!

My MS was a detour into American Poeciliids, but I will be back to catfishes and Southeast Asian freshwater fishes when I start PhD take 2. I'm super excited!!

The part that feels a little odd is that until this semester, I was still officially in the system here as a PhD student so I've been very aware that I was supposed to be a 3rd year PhD at this point. It feels so strange to be going back to 1st year PhD. Other people enter PhDs with a MS, but those are typically MS degrees started with the intent to get an MS. I know the ropes of being a PhD student already but will be masquerading as a fresh new student. Weird.

[narelleart]

Anyone here a killi person involved in killi clubs?

I need access to an article that's locked behind a membership to Killi-Data. I'm hoping to find someone that already has access so I don't have to join.

Here's the one I need:

Huber, J. H. 2019 (31 Aug.) A nomenclatural and systematic analysis of livebearing Cyprinodontiformes (Acanthopterygii: Anablepsinae, Goodeinae, Poeciliidae). Killi-Data Series 2019: 4-155.

[Link]

(All I actually need is the bit on the Poeciliidae.)

I am pretty sure it won't have any new information that I need for my science, but I need to confirm because it's listed on Catalog of Fishes as a relevant citation for taxonomy in one of my study species.

[narelleart]

Oh also I do still need this. Someone in my aquarium club is trying to get it for me but its slow going.

A couple people in the notes suggested contacting the author directly but this isnt a normal scientific article (or I'd have acces through my institution because I too am a scientist). The author of this article is the one who made/runs this website and requires you to join and give *way too much* personal information before you're able to get a copy of this. So I haven't contacted him but I think he'd want me to follow the rules he set for everyone else.

I was hoping to luck out and find someone who was already a member with access that I could mooch off of.

[narelleart]

I kind of want to be a tumblr again.

[narelleart]

Anyone here a killi person involved in killi clubs?

I need access to an article that's locked behind a membership to Killi-Data. I'm hoping to find someone that already has access so I don't have to join.

Here's the one I need:

Huber, J. H. 2019 (31 Aug.) A nomenclatural and systematic analysis of livebearing Cyprinodontiformes (Acanthopterygii: Anablepsinae, Goodeinae, Poeciliidae). Killi-Data Series 2019: 4-155.

[Link]

(All I actually need is the bit on the Poeciliidae.)

I am pretty sure it won't have any new information that I need for my science, but I need to confirm because it's listed on Catalog of Fishes as a relevant citation for taxonomy in one of my study species.