Documenting Reef-Fish Diversity in the Revillagigedo Archipelago, Pacific Mexico, November 2022

Documenting Reef-Fish Diversity in the Revillagigedo Archipelago, Pacific Mexico, November 2022

By Allison Morgan Estape, Citizen Scientist

150 Nautilus Drive Islamorada, Florida 33036, USA. Email: allison.carlos@me.com. 

Photographic Website: https://carlosestape.photoshelter.com/gallery-list.

Between November 20 and December 2, 2022, a group of seven professional ichthyologists from Mexico, Panama and the USA, together with 11 SCUBA-diving photographers experienced in taking diagnostic images of reef-fishes, conducted a scientific expedition aboard the diving-support vessel Quino El Guardian to the Revillagigedo Archipelago, a Mexican Marine Protected Area that lies 250 miles south-southwest of the tip of Baja California. The objectives of the expedition were (1) to photograph all observed species of reef-fishes in their natural habitat at each of the archipelago’s four islands to provide permanent documentation of such species occurrences; and (2) to collect specimens for museums in Mexico and the United States at which they would be used for morphological and genetic assessments of endemism in the archipelagos’ reef-fish fauna and the general relationships of that fauna to the reef-fish fauna of Mexico and other parts of the Tropical Eastern Pacific. This video of a power-point show provides a visual record of the expedition and summarizes the results by island and the expedition’s overall findings to date.