Ray C. Schmidt, PhD

Bumping to the Fishes! and Science feeds🐟🧪

A job ad with multiple images, including the exterior of the museum, a view of collections (jars on shelves), and pictures of some cool, tropical fish but I don't know enough about fish to describe them other than to say they're pretty colors of yellow and blue/green

🚨We're hiring! The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is seeking a tenure-track split position as Assistant Curator of Ichthyology and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Please retweet & share with colleagues! 🐟🐠🧪

Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174674

Dorsal, lateral, and ventral views of Chiloglanis kinsuka, new species, holotype, AMNH 283315, 69.7 mm SL, female, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, Kinsuka Rapids. Photo by T.R. Vigliotta. Scale bar equals 0.5 cm. Inset photo, lower right: coloration in life, AMNH 268960.

Dorsal, lateral, and ventral views of Chiloglanis wagenia, new species, holotype, CUMV 95972, 45.4 mm SL, male, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Orientale, Lualaba River at main portion of Wagenia Falls. Photo by T.R. Vigliotta. Scale bar equals 0.5 cm.

Two new species of African suckermouth catfishes just dropped! Say hello to #Chiloglanis kinsuka from the lower #Congo River at the Kinsuka rapids below Pool Malebo, and #Chiloglanis wagenia, from the Wagenia Falls at Kisangani, more than 1600 km upstream.🐟🧪

digitallibrary.amnh.org/items/3ad0dd...

Wow, more 'myrids described in "Review of the southern African slender stonebashers, genus Heteromormyrus Steindachner 1866 (Teleostei: Mormyridae), with description of six new species" by Mutizwa, Kadye, Bragança & Chakona, open access in J Fish Biol. doi.org/10.1111/jfb....

Pollinators enjoying the goldenrod

A hidden friend!

Shedding the mitochondrial blinkers: A long-overdue challenge for species delimitation in herpetology The advent of molecular methods has revolutionised the field of species delimitation and description, one of the key tasks of systematic biology. In animal taxonomy, one marker, the mitochondrial DNA ...

Shedding the mitochondrial blinkers: A long-overdue challenge for species delimitation in herpetology vertebrate-zoology.arphahub.com/articles.php...

My buttonbush is putting in the work this afternoon

Assistant Professor of Marine Science TT (Marine Vertebrate Ecologist) | St. Petersburg, FL Aug 15 - Eckerd College hiring Assistant Professor of Marine Science TT (Marine Vertebrate Ecologist) in St. Petersburg, Florida on Conservation Job Board. Discover the latest conservation jobs and…

Job Listing - Assistant Professor of Marine Science TT (Marine Vertebrate Ecologist) in St. Petersburg, Florida

Working with @marylanddnr.bsky.social, my lab is working on removing invasive blue catfish from the Chesapeake Bay to protect native species like blue crabs and striped bass. Here's a little preview into a new project an MS student in my lab, Liam Hanley, is working on.

The head of a minnow with a few white bumps distributed on the head.

The little white bumps on the head of this fish are called tubercles, and develop on breeding males. I always like seeing these, I think there's a lot more potential for someone to study tubercles and how they vary across species.

Mimic shiner, Paranotropis volucellus.

Fish time capsules prove plastic’s long reign Tucked away from the exhibit halls of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles (NHMLA), where visitors crowd around T. rex skeletons and a 10.8 pound gold nugget found in the Mojave desert, lies an u...

A nice writeup by @caseagrant.bsky.social on the historical microplastic work we're doing @nhm.org along with @nhmlagems.bsky.social, @jessdflores.bsky.social and @jazminenoamie.bsky.social. Take a look if you're interested in what we've found so far! 🐟🧪

caseagrant.ucsd.edu/news/fish-ti...

The Dark Side of Being a Female Shark Researcher Being a scientist should not require developing the grit to continually endure misogyny, discrimination, harassment, assault or bullying

The Dark Side of Being a Female Shark Researcher | Scientific American | Annual reshare of this important piece around AES conference / Shark week time.

Things are getting better, thanks in no small part to brave people speaking up.

Please R/T: I'm giving a lecture this afternoon on grad school applications for a diverse cohort of REU interns at the Marine Biological Laboratory, and I want to highlight some grad preview programs. If you know of any good ones, can please share them with me?

20 seconds of relative calm from a small spring trickling into the Sare River in Kenya.

Sampling around Migori, Kenya. Hard to set and hold the seine in the fast flows but collected many Chiloglanis somereni. I was doing pretty good transferring them to the collecting jug, but got careless and grabbed one by the tail instead of a spine. It flipped and hit my finger pretty good.

Sampled the Riana River today after a 14 year hiatus. Last sampled in 2011 with the original IRES crew. Thankfully, things are still in decent shape. Dreamed of this river over the years because of the Chiloglanis and Zaireichthys collected. Today added some Gnathonemus sp.

Taking tissues from samples with lots of interest from the local community. Great time to talk about what we are doing and why these fishes and macroinvertebrates are important.

Glad to be back in Kenya. Joining our NSF-funded IRES group for the 2nd three weeks of research on freshwater biodiversity. I'll share pics as we go.

View from the united kenya club

Cataloging fishes

Enjoying lunch

Identifying some fishes

Safely arrived in Kenya. Working with students from Randolph-Macon College, Tulane University, and the National Museums of Kenya. Will survey freshwater biodiversity in western Kenya for the next few weeks. Nice lunch at the museum and cataloging specimens from the past several weeks.

These are great! I am just getting into 3D printing. Is there a good site to get those files? Love to make some for my evolution class.

With the CIPRES portal coming to an end next year, I wonder where people are moving their analyses to? I know of ngphylogeny.fr and a few others, but it would be great to hear what others are using.

Cool fish, are you there for science or a safari?

There is grandeur in this view of life. A couple weeks of down time before heading to Kenya. Good to catch up on some projects.

Grief | Published by ADVANCE Journal This blog post is part of ADVANCE Journal's blog series on the impacts of NSF Grants and their terminations.

Grief | One of the illegally cancelled NSF grants was a grant to make the field of shark science more accessible and inclusive. Some of the PIs of that grant, close friends and collaborators, wrote this.

Teeth first evolved as sensory tissue in the armored exoskeletons of ancient fish, fossil scans find Anyone who has ever squirmed through a dental cleaning can tell you how sensitive teeth can be. This sensitivity gives important feedback about temperature, pressure—and yes, pain—as we bite and chew ...

New paper from the lab: Our teeth arose as sensory organs on the outside of the body of ancient jawless fish.!! Congrats to Yara Haridy and the team!
Background and video: phys.org/news/2025-05...
Open Access Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
News and Views: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A manuscript describing this new #Chiloglanis and another closely related new species should be going out for review shortly.😀

"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."

The top 10 flying insect clades rule the skies—but defy the rules. Weak or inverted latitudinal diversity gradients leave biogeographers puzzled. Entomologists? Mildly amused. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...