Report of the Steering Group to the Advisory Board on the development of the Parosphromenus-Project in 2012
In 2012, the general development of our project continued to be good and very satisfying. 2012 was the second year of the project in its new form as a free, self-organized network. It developed positively, was cited affirmatively, took internationally a leading role in the Parosphromenus affairs. Its permanent work is taken seriously and acknowledged by the important aquaristic associations and in general it is successfully executed by the acting members. Some special events (see below) have been markers of the year, and the constant flow of new members continues. The latter especially has increased the number of friends in America, doubtlessly in the first line due to the American edition of our “Amazonas”-issue and the foundation of the labyrinth association ALFA, but new members have discovered the project from all over the world. We are helped by the fact that the name of the project ensures a front place in all search machines. At the end of the year that flow of new members has become less strong, but nevertheless some new addresses show up every month. This remains to stay the main task of the project, collecting addresses. Unfortunately, from time to time a few addresses fail suddenly and finally must be cancelled, but these are less than four or five a year and therefore are surpassed by new ones very markedly. Very rarely, a member wishes his address to be cancelled. So, with about 350 personal and institutional addresses from 27 countries at the end of 2012 the Parosphromenus-project has reached a new peak of global notice and impact. Nevertheless, especially the latter is not guaranteed by number only, as the experience of this year proves, too.
There were two personal meetings of the steering group in 2012, although not all of it’s members were able to participate. Nevertheless these meetings are extremely useful because talking to each other directly is the fastest way of solving problems. For the first time Bernd Bussler and Peter Finke drove to Denmark for a meeting at Helene Schoubye’s home near Copenhagen, and for the second a greater group (Bernd, Peter, Helene, Uwe Küster and Benjamin Wilden met at that hotel in Hamburg which probably will host our first international meeting September 2013. Distribute some fish was always a nice additional exercise. Among the many decisions taken were how to proceed with the member’s maps at the homepage (meanwhile some results are to be seen), a necessary upgrade of our siftware, how to ensure an attractive program for our planned meeting in Hamburg 2013 and the organization of it. There is a faint chance that somebody will come to Hamburg from Asia and there is somewhat bigger chance of somebody who will come from America. At least we hope so. There is a good opportunity of receiving offspring of at least ten species of licorice gouramis. We still have to solve the problem of translators.
Our homepage in 2012 has become the stabile steering instrument of the project due to the extraordinary and diligent work of our webmaster Helene. This year, a special challenge was to be mastered, the necessary upgrade of our software program. This included some quite difficult jobs that made professional help inevitable. The work was done in November. We decided to entrust a Danish specialist with the central things using some of the money that has been collected in the beginning of our project by donations of our members and that is confined to paying expenses of our website. He did a good job indeed, but many work in details remained to be done by Helene. As we are used to by now, she did that in a marvelous, quiet way, and so we have a perfectly updated website by now enabling us to look safely into the future. However, there are still some shortcomings in it, but they are due to more general and older causes. For instance, our links-section is not as developed as it should be and so is our section on the undescribed species. At least, we have begun this year to develop the homepage in both directions. We are sad however to announce that we completely lost the contact to Wei Dai or David from Shanghai who was engaged in translating our whole homepage to Chinese. Although he had finished a great deal already, he suddenly disappeared and did not respond again to our questions. He just had absolved his exams and then – was lost. Therefore there will be no Chinese version for the time being.
A short word on money. We have no problems with it since we still have a good basis resulting mainly from that request to all members nearly two years ago to donate for the beginning of the work in the internet. Some hitherto additions result from royalties that P. Finke received in 2012 for articles and donations from guests of his birthday party which were added to this account. The costs of the online-service “cloud access and support” were 283,65 Euros, of which 134,00 Euros still have to be paid; the professional “migration” of Joomla (upgrade) 1.5 to 2.5 costed 402,00 Euros. Presently the account of the project is filled with 1.146,00 Euros, and this allows a safe look into the future.
Communication is a major commitment of the project that extends to three continents and 27 countries by now, including all countries within the home range of our fish. The largest amount of this communication is carried out in private e-mails coming from people or institutions all over the world to the members of the steering group who respond privately again and so this is never seen publicly by all. A small part of this is to welcome new members who have registered in our project’s database, and we take the opportunity to ask for some missing informations (f.i. country, town or special interests). Another part will become public by our Forum, which generally developed well with the exception of the Asian regional section. It is quite obvious that our Asian friends have special difficulties with the political aspects of the project’s work since they are less used to talk overtly and loudly about the mistakes of the environmental politics in their home countries. The American forum could run better, too, but the continued organization of ALFA is a obviously prerequisite. The European forum runs better, and best the one which deals with the General questions. Generally, the English language has become the leading language in our international communication. There are a few cases only that a different language has been used in our Forum. Even if Germans are talking with Germans within the project forum, they use English, meanwhile.
In 2012 some important publications have appeared. We have mentioned the American edition of our Parosphromenus-issue in the Amazonas-magazine that has reached Asia too and is one of the few first-hand-informations on the actual situation of the licorice gouramis in English language. Besides, some new articles in other aquarium magazines and in general newspapers called attention to our aims. Members of the project in various countries wrote on their methods and on special species, or described the situation of the destruction in Indonesia and Malaysia and/or the project’s way of taking part in the fight of the international environmental community against it. A big German newspaper published a long article on the aquarium hobby and cited our project several times. At the end of the year, a British scientific journalist from York payed a visit to Peter Finke in order to prepare a large article on the Parosphromenus-project for another great weekly newspaper. It will appear in January 2013.
We congratulate our members Ingo Schindler and Horst Linke to have finally brought the halting flow of the scientific descriptions of new species to run again, since nothing had appeared since seven years although many new locations were discovered and fish looking more or less differently were brought to our notice. In describing Parosphromenus gunawani (for hitherto spec. Danau Rasau) and Parosphromenus phoenicurus (for spec. Langgam), both from Jambi/Sumatra, the authors extended the list of the described species to twenty at last, but there are nevertheless still about the same number of unclear new forms waiting for scientific treatment. However, it is to be admitted that in many cases the traditional methods of taxonomy come to an end since by excluding behavioural and genetic informations their exact status must remain unclear. This was not the problem in the case of the two new species mentioned. As genetics is concerned, the long-time cooperation with the “Fish-BOL-project” in Guelph/Canada ended disappointingly since most of the detailed informations accompagnying the hundreds of valuable specimen in alcohol were lost (thrown away!) by unexperienced helpers who were in charge of listing them. So it was necessary to change our partner. Our friend in the Advisory Board, the geneticist from the museum of natural history in Berne (Switzerland), Dr. Lukas Rüber, took great efforts to advance or knowledge in Paro-genetics by own expeditions and new publications, but there remain many questions open for the future. At any rate, a new start has been made.
Another very valuable article was written as an admission thesis for his exams in biology by our steering group-member Martin Fischer: the first really comprehensive and competent Wikipedia account of the licorice gouramis, at first in German only but an English translation is to be prepared. Martin has performed an extremely good job that was evaluated with the best note in his exams. He used many of his own photos, mentioned all associations and institutions that play a role in this business and cited a good deal of the relevant literature, including that referring to the Parosphromenus-project, mentioning its central role again.
Looking at the four aims of our project – aquaristic, nature conservancy, peoples’ rights, and citizen science – the first mentioned is in the centre of most of our members’ activities, of course. Nevertheless it has to be stressed that there are always members who pay special attention to the other aims. As an example, we call to attention that the just named article of Schindler and Linke – to our knowledge – is the first scientific description of licorice gouramis that mentions within the text the destruction of the rain forests as political catastrophy for Asian’s biodiversity. Besides, the project again took part in actions of other organizations, e.g. that of www.rainforest-rescue. For the first time, the Indonesian government cancelled a logging-project on Sumatra because of these critical publications. On the other hand, while writing this, Christian Hinz is travelling in Sarawak and reports a big ricefield at the former location of P. allani. The disaster of cultural injustice to the indigene peoples of mainly Kalimantan, Sumatra and Sarawak is another issue that is inevitably bound to our project and we have continued to inform about this in our Asian forum and by private and public letters to newspapers and radio stations. Whereas the European Union has made a remarkable stop to the usage of palm-oil products for bio-fuels, it has not acclaimed the inhuman practices of parts of the European industry in the logging areas in equally clear a way. We must be always aware of the fact that in perceiving the fate of our fish and biodiversity we are in danger to obstruct our view in respect to human rights and cultural diversity. The project will especially bear this in mind and act accordingly. At the latest, the Parosphromenus project is an example of the powers and vigour of citizen science. This was stressed in several publications and even has found its way into serious scientific journals. There is an invitation to P. Finke for lectures on Citizen Science to the famous Humboldt University in Berlin next year.
Looked from outside, the half-annual census is surely one of the most observed activities. We are grateful to Christian Hinz for his continued work on this, and in 2012 he was very effectively assisted by Uwe Küster (Hanover). Uwe’s task is to collect all the single mails and notes on individual stocks into a single overview called the “synopsis”, and this is quite a work that needs his accuracy and diligence. Afterwards, Christian decides about the actual responsibilities (“godfathers”) and comments on the result in general and in detail. We saw this good cooperation twice this year and are grateful to both members of our steering group for performing this to the benefit of all.
In general we have to observe a mixed success of our sustainment program for aquarium stocks.
Partly this is due to the fact that most of our members are hobbyists; but it should be mentioned that here and there an institute or other professional agent got involved, too. Whereas some species are present in good stocks (mostly the less specialized, but ornaticauda too), we have problems with others (f.i. opallios, rubrimontis, pahuensis, sumatranus), and even lost one (allani); another one (deissneri) is close to that (only one pair left). This result is partly disappointing. Does not everybody take seriously what being a godfather means? It is by sure useful that the godfather-list is from now on formulated explicitely beginning with the Census Fall 2012 to let nobody remain unclear about its importance. Additionally, in 2012 we started a second line of godfathers who are responsible for a single species only (“specialists”); by now there are four resp. five of them (for quindecim, filamentosus, anjunganensis, nagy Kuantan and nagyi Cherating).
There were ten Newsletters this year, and additionally we began with the Newsletters special of which we distributed eight at special occasions to different groups of addresses. Unfortunately, we added to a certain disturbance by communicating a wrongly determined import with wrong details; factually we were pleased to extend our list of unclear forms by the new spec. Ampah. We mainly are grateful to Martin Hallmann who discovered this Kalimantan form in the tanks of a German wholesaler. Another new form from Sumatra was caught and distributed by Horst Linke (spec. Dua). Always, there are some responses by some people to these newsletter informations, and we are always pleased to see them as a confirmation not only of arrival but of approvement and encouragement.
There are many ideas and duties for 2013. We have to supply our species descriptions, the maps, the F.A.Q.s, the links, and to enliven the regional forums. We have to organize a good first meeting in Hamburg and to amend the success of the sustainment breeding of several species. We must try to improve the distribution of offspring across the political borders at least within Europe and we have to keep in touch with the ongoing events in south-east Asia and continue to take influence on its environmental and cultural politics. Above all we have to preserve our powers and hope for a further constant flow of new members. We have to look for new people willing to cooperate in the steering group and the other positions which our project has to fill by active friends of our endangered fish.
So, we look forward to the New Year with good prospects but clear scopes and missions, too. This was the report on 2012 of the Steering Group of the Parosphromenus-Project:
In alphabetical order: Bernd Bussler, Peter Finke, Martin Fischer, Christian Hinz, Uwe Küster, Uwe Römer, Helene Schoubye, Benjamin Wilden