"FISH IN THE DESERT" "Planet Earth is an oasis of life advancing across bareness." "Crossing the bareness of the unknown, a group of people search for the fish that live in the desert." "Rivers Draa, Ziz and Ghir emerge from the High Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco." "These rivers were part of much larger aquatic systems that connected the Sahara when, only a few thousand years ago, it was a much wetter place, but today they are like islands of running water, that have their sources in the mountains and end up in the desert." "It is an extreme ecosystem, right on the limit and further south from there one will only find the pure desert and nothing more." "There are many biological groups that have their range of limits there, such as the barbels and the brown trout, to name a few, and also the otter makes its home in these extreme conditions." "It is related to the curiosity about how life is lived in the extremes, in the borders of vast nothingness... in the very corner, you can't go beyond." "How do you live pushing life's limits?" "They arrive suddenly, without a warning, with a machine that attracts fish and puts them at their fingertips." "Yes, this is the field work of a research project that tries to learn about how fishes manage to live in these pre-Saharan river basins." "The main aim of the project is to find out which fish species live in rivers of the driest region of Morocco, describe their distribution and assess their conservation status." "Regarding the otter, we wanted to know its distribution and the environmental factors that determine it, while performing more specific ecological studies, mainly centred on diet composition." "This is an exploratory project, of the kind we enjoy a lot because it has a very important field component." "It is about going to a place to find out what is there and how it is, and that opens the door for many other further questions." "Trying to find out about reality inevitably implies altering it." "As you find out more, well, you enjoy it more." "I suppose that this happens to anyone who is passionate about something, in any other activity." "The more you learn, the more you enjoy, because you become able to differentiate subtle nuances... how different a barbel is from a tilapia, here in the desert." "Central to this is always the curiosity, what moves you to research something... asking why is this like it is or how would that be..." "I would like to know, and understand why." "I recognise that most of my interests are more naturalistic than scientific... more than solving a scientific issue, which is more related to "how", I am attracted to, and enjoy a lot with the "what"." "I am interested in any aspect of how the world works, the world understood from the most general view to the little head of anyone of us... what happens inside us, how we generate ideas, and affections and dislikes." "But in the end one has to focus on what he thinks he is able to answer, and in my case this is within Natural History." "For reaching answers, first you have to make the questions, and it is much better to have your own questions, instead of borrowing them from others, because things don't work as well when you borrow other's questions." "In science you have to be a curious person, be willing to approach new issues and have the imagination to figure out the means to answer the questions that you have formulated." "The subtle distance between the living and the dead is water." "I suppose that many will die, most of them... in this area, where water is almost disappearing, where most river beds are completely dry, where these remaining pools are few and small," "I think that most fish will die, but in some places some will survive, those that will later repopulate the river." "Fish are difficult to study because they live in an environment that is not ours and we have to devise the means to reach them." "We visited several sites across the study area, trying to include as much range as possible of its range of environmental variability." "Fish communities were sampled by means of electrofishing." "An electric field is introduced in the water and fish involuntarily swim to the positive pole." "When they are near enough they get stunned, in a state called electronarcosis." "They are then easily caught, but they soon recover." "At some point in the history of humankind, somebody learnt to count, inadvertently connecting two parallel universes, the real world and the world of numbers." "Ecology as a science works mainly by assigning numbers to things that happen in nature, by quantifying." "Those numbers are then used to approach the questions raised objectively." " 79,... - 102,..." " 82..." "Did I say 216?" "..." " Yes" " Should be 116...." " I just said 95" " Write that this has red cancer... - 164..." "Electrofishing has several limitations." "You have to be standing in the water, and thus if the water is too deep you just can't use this technique." "But then there is also water salinity: above a certain threshold it is not possible to use electrofishing devices." " Nice, nice, nice... pull, pull!" " Which way?" "!" " Left, left!" "Seine nets work as a trawler boat, by pulling a net close to the bottom up to the shore." " Some seemed very snub-nosed" " A lot of them escaped, man" " What's this?" "And we also used fyke nets, which are basically funnel traps that direct the fish to a chamber from where it is difficult for them to escape." " 125,... it´s yellow one." "127 sampling sites in 80 days, 20,000 kilometres driven," "13 people involved, 23,400 fish captured." "In these three basins there are several fish species." "Some of them are native to the area, while others, as happens in many other places, are non-native species that humans have introduced, either intentionally or by accident." "We found up to 8 non-native fish species." "Non-native species have different origins and arrive through different pathways." "There are many different reasons that can lead people to stock non-native fish." "We think that in these desert rivers fish introductions are recent, from the last decades, and they are probably associated with sport fishing." "The Moroccan administrative body still promotes the introduction of some non-native fish, as an added value for natural systems." "In fact, this has been a common practice in Spain, up to very recent times." "If we consider the number of species as an important figure, introducing one more species could seem good... but we do not know how the ecosystem will change due to the introduction, and that is risky." "Barbels are the most common native fish in the desert." "These barbels belong to the genus Luciobarbus, which is the same that can be found in the Iberian and the Balkan Peninsulas." "The name of barbels refers to the two pairs of barbules that these animals have, which look like small pieces of moustache." "Barbules are sensorial organs used to inspect the bottom;" "barbels are mainly bottom-dwelling fish that feed on the river bed." "We know very little about these specific barbels, but we can assume that they feed on insects and organic matter they find in the bottom." "We were surprised to find barbel populations in highly saline rivers, some of them having 15 to 20 grams of salt per litre, which is quite a lot." "Other barbel populations occupy extremely arid areas, living in very small pools that are completely isolated from other water masses, either in springs or in permanent pools within temporary river networks." "We tentatively assume that there are two different barbel species, one in the Draa basin, the other species, Luciobarbus pallaryi, inhabits the Ziz and the Ghir basins." "When you look at barbels of a given site, it is shocking how different they are from one to another." "We took samples to make genetic analyses and try to relate morphological and genetic variation, but the morphological variability could also be related to ecology, due to an individual-based specialization on a given resource that could affect morphology." "Or maybe it is simply that different barbels of the same species look different, just as we are all different." "Where waters are colder and faster, there is a hidden treasure of natural history." "In the mountain there are trout, brown trout populations in the Draa basin represent the oldest trout lineage found to date." "There is no other known brown trout population with such an ancient origin, and, due to its long-lasting isolation, it is possible that they deserve being described as a new species." "In the Draa basin there are two populations of this very old lineage, which has remained in isolation there for 1.5 million years." "We also found trout in the Ziz basin, a very healthy and abundant population, but these trout do not belong to the ancient lineage, they are very similar to the rest of trout populations in Morocco, which, in turn, are very similar to the trout found in some areas of the Iberian Peninsula." "In saline rivers and pools there are two tropical species." "We found tilapias in the hottest part of the study area, only at elevations below 850 metres, and this is for Oreochromis auerus, the blue tilapia, which, for being a tilapia, is a quite tolerant species." "The other tilapia, Coptodon zillii, is restricted to even lower elevations with limits at elevations of around 500 metres." "48 kilometres searching for otter signs, 1,300 scats found," "554 of them collected and analysed, leading to the identification of remains from at least 1,600 fish." "Desert otters eat mainly barbels, which is not surprising, since barbels were very common during the whole survey." "However, it was surprising that the otter fed quite frequently on reptiles, such as terrapins and water snakes." "The otter can eat almost anything big enough that it finds in rivers, such as crayfish, frogs, and even insects, but it is specialised in eating fish, no matter what kind of fish, the otter eats resources that are found in rivers, and therefore it depends on rivers." "Otter distribution is limited in the lowlands by the extreme aridity and towards the highlands by the extreme mountain environments, thus the otter has something like an optimum habitat at intermediate elevations." "Fish can disappear completely from many sections of the rivers and possibly for years." "If there are no fish there will be no otters, either they leave or they die there." "But then it rains, and some years are more humid, so otters return to some places." "This dynamic, this adventure of the otters' disappearance and reappearance, this living in extreme conditions, is one of the most interesting part about this project." "Knowing the environment is essential to manage natural resources, and satisfy the needs of all people, present and future." "We scientists tend to think, or we do think, that knowledge helps people, helps humankind." "Even findings that may seem useless can become useful in a given moment, as has happened with many discoveries." "Our leaders have decided that generating non-commercial knowledge is no longer important." "There is an absolute prioritization of research lines focussed on obtaining a direct economic profit." "This is explicitly stated in the Spanish research strategy with the sentence from idea to market." "Four scientific generations mix with the lives of desert fish." "The way of working, the approaches, and even the ideas that we have about ourselves have greatly changed since I began my career... there were so few researchers in Spain, if you had a PhD and you wanted to do research," "sooner or the later a permanent position would be offered, and you would be able to apply for it and most likely obtain the job." "Thus, I was never too worried for my future as a biologist." "The situation of science in Spain changed radically from 1982." "There were clear decisions and a team that created the conditions to do modern science in Spain." "This change took place with Javitxu's generation, an important part of which has ended doing research and these decisions are now "the good ones"." "My job consists in half-time doing research and half-time teaching at university." "That was the fattening period, in which the Spanish science and technology system was growing and the budgets were growing, always below European standards, but growing." "That generation is followed by a generation of deceleration, the one of Miguelito Clavero." "He is a brilliant researcher and has obtained a 5-year contract, which is the maximum that you can get, but the future will be hard for him." "Nowadays when contracts finish, it is finished, there is an abyss and there are very few chances to continue, if any... the future, maybe in another place, but here it is very difficult, or maybe out of science, you never know." "And finally the fourth generation is formed by those that are now students, for whom almost everything will be very difficult, from getting grants to simply entering in the research system." "With the current situation, continuing requires a very, very strong vocation." "My intention was doing a PhD, but now I don't know." "I see myself having to move abroad in the near future, because I like research and I would like to continue with what I am doing, but here, so far, there is nothing at all." "This is a kind of job that you have to like, because if not, the salary would not be worth it, for other purposes it would not be worth doing many of the things we do, but we want to know more." "By all means, you are already bitten by curiosity, once you are bitten one way or the other you manage to keep on doing things that are or resemble science." " 59 and 46..." "This scientific project was funded by grant #9188-12 of the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society"