This summer, our UMSL field team—Casey Ernest, Soren Johnson, and myself—joined forces with Lina Bichuette from the Universidade Federal de São Carlos and her student Brenda Almeida for an exciting expedition to Goiás, Brazil. Our shared mission was to explore the incredible diversity of fishes that inhabit the region’s caves, as well as their close relatives in surface streams.
We focused on several catfish lineages, including species in the genera Aspidoras, Ancistrus, and Ituglanis. These groups include species that thrive in surface habitats as well as others that have adapted to the perpetual darkness of caves. By comparing their ecology and genomes, we hope to shed light on how fishes colonize subterranean environments and evolve traits that allow them to persist there.
The expedition is part of a larger NSF-funded project aimed at investigating the ecology and evolution of cavefishes across a wide range of lineages. Fieldwork in Brazil provided invaluable opportunities to collect new data and strengthen collaborations with local experts who have long worked on the unique biodiversity of the country’s karst regions.
