The final installation of our Australian trip recount adjourns with the meeting of Dr. Anthony Gill at the Macleay Museum of Sydney. If you remembered, we took a little trip to Cairns recently where we had the privilege of seeing the wonderful and impeccable凯恩斯海洋的设施和their team. Before our flight back to Singapore, we stopped over at Sydney for a little galavanting if you must.
Dr. Anthony Gill is an ichthyologist, and the current authority in Pseudochromidae, or dottybacks. He’s also worked extensively on gobies and is an all rounded genius when it comes to fish ID. We paid him a visit at the Macleay Museum in the Sydney University located just a few minutes walk from Broadway. The university campus, as pictured above, is beautiful and breathtaking to say the least. The sandstone architecture and the main building in front of the trafalgar square really cements its place as one of the top 10 most beautiful universities.
你们中的一些人可能会发现他的名字很熟悉——我知道我did when I first contacted him. Apart from authoring publications and numerous description papers on dottybacks, Dr. Gill is a frequent visitor to forums and facebook pages where he judiciously scans for interesting fishes and identifies them with impeccable accuracy. Seriously though this isn’t made up. He ID-ed a goby that had gone unidentified for years on our local forum.
Needless to say we had to pay him a visit when we stopped over in Sydney, and boy were we glad we did! Dr. Gill does most of his work at the Macleay Museum, where he has an office in the curator’s room. For a brief history and location of the museum, this关联may prove useful.
When we approached him, he was working on a revision paper for the dottyback generalubbockichthysas well asPseudoplesiops, for which he gave us a quick peek. Both genera are quite poorly understood and known in the aquarium trade, with numerous erroneous identifications made over the years. This revision when due will hopefully be curative of that. There are also some new species which we cannot disclose as of now.
除了愉快的事，他很友善，可以带我们在公共和公共区域的博物馆场上进行游览。我认为不用说，对于我们来说，最好的空间必须是将鱼类收藏的人。一堆尺寸的罐子里的罐子随意地坐在金属架子上，每个罐子都散发出微弱的光芒，因为天花板渗透到透明的眼镜上。
我们被告知，大部分收藏馆已经移至另一个博物馆，这里没有任何整体型。但是，这并没有阻止我们扫描每个罐子寻找凉爽的东西。我个人喜欢死的东西，我有一系列昆虫的exuvia和其他非常规的房间装饰，这些装饰是我的房间。这就是太平间可以为我获得的糖果店式。
Most of the specimens are really really old. How old? Well take a look at the preserved specimens ofHeniochus acuminatus和Chelmon marginalisabove. The junior synonymsHeniochus macrolepidotusas well asChelmo tricinctus使用了数百年来已停用的。那应该让您知道这些年龄多大。
It was a hoot going through each and every jar, listening to Dr. Gill elaborate a little bit on the history as well as the contents of each. The alcohol and longevity of the specimens made identifying the species really challenging. Some of the fish with darker striped pigments such asAcanthurus lineatustook really well to preservation, but others were mostly pale and nondescript. We took a couple of photos and uploaded them in the small gallery above. How many fish can you identify?
非常整洁的是广泛的澳大利亚鱼类，在任何地方都不经常看到。一些更晦涩的物种可能对您不熟悉，但肯定Paraplesiops bleekeri, as washed out as it is, would still strike a chord to many.
Straying away briefly from the ichthyological side of life, Dr. Gill also showed us the entomology assemblage in the off public area, which is home to a good collection of insect holotypes. The familiar and potent scent of naphthalene caresses and then violates your nose as you step into this room, a necessary ingredient for preservation and prevention of insect damage to butterfly collections.
Wonderful collection of butterflies and moths greet the enthusiastic entomologist here as each drawer is gingerly pulled open. One of my favourite collections in the room had to be this one above, featuring the Jezebel butterflies of the genusDelias. A good lot of these are montane and isolated in their range, and many are exceedingly rare.
Again, we’ve included a small gallery above for your viewing pleasure. Many of these specimens are so old that they’re inevitably falling apart.
现在回到鱼！吉尔博士的“实验室”，他的实际工作是一个奇迹。如果我们没有提及，吉尔博士可以说是形态学家，并且非常重视其对象的结构，形态和解剖学。因此，他的工作场所充满了材料，化学物质和样品，可以帮助他这样做。
A wide range of interesting things are going on in this lab, and it’s dizzying to grasp everything at one go. First of all, Dr. Gill has a rather neat collection of dead fish which he collects and stains for both recreational as well as scientific purposes. By using certain dyes to stain specific parts of a fish, he has managed to isolate the structures that he wants to study.
Skeleton and boney structures can be stained purple while cartilage, blue. The rest of the fish can be dissolved away using enzymes and other chemicals, leaving a clear looking shell of the former organism with colourful organs and bone structure.
这是经过染色的文件鱼的示例。查看骨骼和光线如何清晰涂色，而肉是清晰且不引人注目的。可以将样品放在显微镜下，然后在其中仔细研究它，从而使用户可以相对轻松地计数椎骨和其他显微结构。
A device called the camera lucida is also attached to the microscope which projects the sample image onto a piece of paper, that can then be traced out for scientific drawings. This of course allows for really accurate and scale representations of the actual sample without having to do it free hand. As usual we’ve added a small gallery above showing a few more photos of such stains and other cool paraphernalia.
Here is an example of hand drawn scientific images using the microscope and image projecting technology. The drawings are scanned and printed as such, and provides realistic looking scale models of the actual subject. Here we see examples of gill-arches (sometimes called “pharyngeal jaws”) and accompanying systems of various gobies in a range of genera. Gill arches or brachial arches, are supporting structures that are made up of boney loops that support the gills in fish. Understanding the morphology to this level is just as, if not more important than DNA analysis in helping to understand the fish’s behaviour as well as its placement in a certain genera.
Apart from staining, X-ray films can also be done on fish. As above, this provides a good look at the vertebrae and other associated structures for meristics and studies. If you look at the gallery above again, you’ll see a couple more photos, including some preserved fish in jars. There is alubbockichthys tanakaiamongst various other dottybacks, a fish that i’ve yet to see alive in person.
As a parting gift, Dr. Gill so kindly gave us a copy of his Pseudochrominae revision, with every known dotty back description in this subfamily up to 2004. We’re still going through this slowly! It has been a humbling experience and an absolute pleasure catching up with Dr. Gill. Hope to see you again soon some day, maybe with a new dotty back species in your bag.
We hope you’ve enjoyed recounting our trip in Australia. Keep reading for more eye opening travelogues as we take you around the world in our pockets! Until next time!
