The Science and Technology Department is organising a conference on Thursday 14 April from 12.15pm in Amphitheatre C at the University of French Guiana on the subject of freshwater and brackish fish in French Guiana. It will be presented by Grégory QUARTAROLLO, President of the Guyane Wild Fish association.
What do Guyana's waterways have to hide? In many people's minds, the most common answer is monsters ready at a moment's notice to devour us: caimans, anacondas, piranhas. The truth is: yes, these animals are there, and lucky are those who stumble across them, because more often than not, it's they who end up being eaten!
By going beyond beliefs, prejudices and fears, when you start to dive into the world of Guyana's waterways, or rather worlds, because each river, each creek, each pripri is a unique world. You'll discover an incredible diversity of habitats and living organisms: more than a dozen species of shrimp, crabs and molluscs, several hundred species of aquatic macroinvertebrates, most of which are barely visible to the naked eye, and more than 400 species of fish of all shapes, sizes and colours.
The aim of the conference is to provide interested parties with an overview of the diversity of freshwater and brackish water fish in French Guiana, a complex diversity that has yet to reveal all its secrets. It will focus on the diversity of orders and genera, with a particular emphasis on the most important orders: Characiformes, Siluriformes, Cyprinodontiformes, Perciformes and Gymnotiformes. It will be accompanied by numerous photos of known, little-known and recently discovered species.
A fifteen-minute video documentary about an expedition carried out in 2020 on the Tampock, a tributary of the Upper Maroni, will be screened. During this expedition, the aim was to collect specimens that the scientific community lacked or tissue for genetics: 106 species were observed or captured.
And time permitting, we'll be sharing the story of Guyane Wild Fish's latest adventure in the Amazonian Park, on Mount Atachi Baka, in collaboration with the CNRS, the Amazonian Park of French Guiana and the Trésor association.
In the meantime, visit the Guyane Wild Fish association page, followed by over 13,000 people in more than 70 countries: https://www.facebook.com/guyanewildfish.
