Scott Schaefer's Research Projects

Lithogenes
Scott Schaefer studies the systematics, biogeography, and evolutionary morphology of the tropical freshwater fishes of Africa and South America, regions that contain the most diverse, yet poorly known, continental fish faunas of the world. Exploration and discovery, the major priorities of systematic ichthyology for more than 200 years, are now more urgent than ever because of the high rates of environmental degradation in the developing world. At present, there may be 10,000 species of fishes in South America alone, yet little more than half of that total has been studied to date. Scott's research seeks to resolve problems in the taxonomy, classification, and evolution of those fish groups that dominate the ecology of riverine systems, such as catfishes and characoids. Much of this involves fieldwork and the search for undescribed fish diversity in poorly known regions, such as the Amazon and Orinoco River basins of South America.
Pygidianops magoi
Some of Scott's projects try to reconstruct patterns of relationships among species and higher groups as part of broader efforts to interpret the distributions of fishes relative to what we know about major patterns of biotic and earth history. Other projects examine morphological structure, such as bones and muscles, and function in order to understand the evolution of particular anatomical systems in the history of clade diversification.

characiform
Scott's current projects include an NSF-supported taxonomic revision of the family Astroblepidae, a group of about 50 catfish species that live at high elevations in the Andes; review of the dwarf characids of the Lower Guinean Province of west-central Africa; and phylogenetic relationships among genera of African characoids based on morphological and molecular DNA sequence data. Recent fieldwork in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela has resulted in the addition to the Museum of several new and important collections of fishes and has provided the raw materials for several ongoing and future research projects.