Tag Archives: ichthyology

In Memoriam: Fang Fang

Fang Fang in lab

Fang in the lab, May 2002. Photo (c) Staffan Waerndt.

Little has appeared in this blog lately, although its author is never far from the keyboard. The main reason has been the year-long, now ended suffering of my wife and research team member, Fang Fang. The last paper that she actively authored will appear the coming week, and it seems timely to write something about Fang here and now.

Fang was born in Beijing in 1962. She had an MSc in fish biology and left a position at the Institute of Zoology in Beijing when she came to Sweden in 1993 to do her PhD at Stockholm University. With time she turned Swedish, and completed her PhD with a dissertation on danios which she defended in 2001 with Richard P. Vari as opponent.

Fang remained all the time with the Swedish Museum of Natural History, upholding various positions, eventually as a curator in the Swedish FishBase team where, among other things, she was the key person behind the triannual Artedi Symposia. She was probably the greatest fan of Artedi ever. For over two years she also coordinated ECOCARP, a major collaborative project with several European and Chinese laboratories joining to search for Asian aquaculture fish candidates. Over the last years there was not much time for research. She was secretary in the European Ichthyological Society, member of the IUCN freshwater fish specialist group, and much more. Nonetheless, she was the author of 30 papers, and two are still to appear.

Fang passed away on 19 May, 2010, after a year of fight against cancer. She is buried in the St. Botvid cemetery south of Stockholm, in a peaceful setting overlooking a bay of Lake Mälaren.

Fang was an open, cheerful person that made many friends within and outside science, and in many ways made ichthyology more fun. With her passing, Ichthyology has lost much of its charm.

Fang’s research focussed on danios. Her favorite fish was one she discovered in Myanmar in 1997, a very distinctive danio, golden with dark brown spots, which she named Danio kyathit. It  soon became a much appreciated aquarium fish. Although there is a species named after her, Devario fangfangae, her name will probably be more firmly associated with Danio kyathit. Her legacy includes an additional nine species of Danio and Devario, and several other taxa.

Read more about Fang on the family’s memorial web site.

Species of danios described by Fang:

Devario maetaengensis (Fang, 1997)
Danio kyathit Fang, 1998
Devario apopyris (Fang & Kottelat, 1999)
Devario leptos (Fang & Kottelat, 1999)
Devario acrostomus (Fang & Kottelat, 1999)
Danio roseus Fang & Kottelat, 2000
Danio aesculapii Kullander & Fang, 2009
Danio quagga Kullander, Liao & Fang, 2009
Danio tinwini Kullander & Fang, 2009
Devario xyrops Fang & Kullander, 2009

Behind the scenes in Ichthyology

It is true that most of the world’s population lives some distance away from a major natural history museum. Even if you live close and come often to visit the exhibits, what you experience is only a minor part of the activity, the objects and the spirits of a natural history “museum” (better called science collections or research collections). Only a fraction of the millions of objects are on display, and nearly all of the research and curation is out of sight.

Lack of public access to collections and research areas is sometimes lamented by the public, and in response to that some scientific collections do provide guided tours of the galleries for those with a special interest. With the right guide it can be exciting, but expect that for the non-specialist research collections tend to be highly repetitive, with large numbers of seemingly identical objects, and storage conditions are optimised for long-term storage and not for easy access for viewing. The researchers and collections staff are of course not on display. They have to work on, eternally understaffed, with their task to investigate and maintain the collections. Many scientific collections provide good insight into the research going on by public lectures and content-rich web sites. Projects like FishBase and GBIF make data and specimens from many collections available from their portals.

On occasion of the tricentennial of the birth of Petrus Artedi (1705-1735), Elizabeth Watson, Node Manager at GBIF-Sweden, made a film illustrating the change of scientific ichthyology from the lone man in the 18th Century taking notes by the lake to the industrial process including all sorts of technology and a rather large number of people that make Ichthyology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, one of the major natural science collections in Europe.

One of the blessings of the Internet (in this case YouTube in particular) is that everyone with a reasonable bandwidth can now get behind the scenes in Ichthyology, in a shorter version of the Artedi film, illustrating the work of today.

Click image to play film