Meeting Notes

October, 2008

Dr. Ray Engeszer is a researcher at the University of Maryland and lecturer at Georgetown University, and he talked about Zebra fish behavior in August to PVAS.

He returned to October's meeting to talk about his research trip to Lake Malawi where he hobbled around with an untreated broken foot while joining a research team to study things such as vision and olfactory senses.

He had pictures of the facility where he and other researchers worked dissecting and studying the fish. He said the water temperature is 72 degrees year round. He complimented their WWF assistant, Robert, who is the only full time person at the facility, which has a World Wildlife Federation status. Robert takes them to the fishing locations, is Mr. fix-it and catches the fish.

Lake Malawi is surrounded by Malawi on the west and southeast, and Tanzania and Mozambique are on the east/northeast side of the lake. Dr. English had interesting videos of cichlid courtship, and he took pictures of the beautiful blue and yellow and red cichlids. There was a lot of unique but unpublished mating behavior that Dr Engeszer observed such as breeding depressions in the sand and building mounds by the same species. Other fish videos showed predators and a large catfish in the lake.

Recording Secretary, Mark Harnet