The Upper Congo Fishes Project is an international collaboration of ichthyologists working to improve our knowledge of the fish fauna of the Upper Congo Rapids and the surrounding area while developing expertise and institutional capacity at the University of Kisangani (UNIKIS) in D.R. Congo.  Much of the funding for this work in 2010 comes from a U.S. Fulbright African Regional Research Fellowship and an Encyclopedia of Life Rubenstein Fellowship awarded to Dr. John P. Sullivan of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates who will spend February to October 2010 in Kisangani working with UNIKIS faculty and students.

Among the world’s river systems the Congo is second only to the Amazon in size and in the diversity of its fishes.  More than 800 fish species inhabit the Congo’s waterways (excluding the hundreds of species endemic to Lake Tanganyika which lies within the basin).  Fishes are fundamenta

l components of the Congo River ecosystem and essential food for millions of people in Central Africa. They have diversified into myriad forms, evolving extraordinary adaptations for life in diverse environments such as high current, great depth, or darkness. Yet despite its economic importance and scientific value, the Congo River ichthyofauna remains poorly known. Many species still await discovery and description. Of those known to science, much remains to be learned about their distribution, ecologies, life histories and evolutionary relationships.

Kisangani, a city of over 700,000 people in the center of the vast Congo Basin rainforest, sits just below Boyoma Falls (Stanley Falls in the colonial era), the last of seven cataracts in which the Lualaba River falls 60 meters in a span of 100 kilometers.  As it spills into the “Central Cuvette” at Kisangani, the river acquires its evocative name, the Congo.  It remains unbroken by falls or rapids again for more than 1700 kilometers until it arrives at the southern lip of Malebo Pool, where the twin capitals of Brazzaville and Kinshasa face each other on opposite banks.  Past this point, the Congo plunges 280 meters to sea level over 32 cataracts on its way to the Atlantic. The distinctive fish fauna of these tremendous rapids of the Lower Congo are the subject of continuing study. Comparatively little is known of the fishes of the Upper Congo Rapids and the surrounding aquatic habitats.  Work we are undertaking at UNIKIS will help us answer basic, but important questions concerning the identity and evolution of the Upper Congo fish fauna and its relationship to that of the Lower Congo and other parts of the Congo Basin.

This project shares the philosophy of the Central Africa Natural History Museum Initiative (CANHMI) that aims to partner North American and European natural history museums with institutions in Central Africa.  CANHMI’s goals are based on the observation that most of our planet’s undocumented flora and fauna exist in places that lack adequate institutional capacity to describe, archive, and disseminate information about their biodiversity to the rest of the world. We are working to establish the UNIKIS Department and Laboratory of Hydrobiology and Aquaculture as an important resource for aquatic conservation efforts and fish systematics: one that will benefit from and contribute to international initiatives such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), FishBase, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and the Fish Barcode of Life project (FISH-BOL).  We hope you’ll follow the progress of this project. Return to the NEWS and TAXA pages on this site and stay connected to the Project on Facebook.  Things get underway on the ground (and in the water) in February 2010!