 Moises Bernal and I on our last dive of the trip in Las Perlas The month of May saw the LSU ichthyology lab collecting in drastically different places on the globe. Prosanta and I finished up our Middle East collection at the beginning of May, and shortly after I found myself traveling with Moises Bernal, University of Texas graduate student who is completing his research at the California Academy of Science, to his homeland of Panama. The trip was funded by the American Museum of Natural History Lerner Grey Grant and the LSU Museum of Natural Science, and while we collected a variety of species, our main goal was to collect the sawtail surgeonfish, Prionurus laticlavius, for one of my dissertation chapters. The hot and dry conditions we experienced in the Middle East had no resonance in the wet, humid, tropics of Central America. Our trip was brief, leaving us a limited number of sampling days for the Pacific coast of Panama. However, rough sea conditions arrived with us, resulting in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) halting all marine operations for several days. Luckily the weather did stay too long, and with the hard work of STRI boat organizer Reinaldo Tapia and STRI dive safety officer Raul De Leon we got several days of diving through STRI at Isla Taboga, near the STRI Naos lab, and in Las Perlas Archipelago. To get back some of the days we lost due to weather, Moises and I decided to dive throughout the weekend and got in touch with Guillermo Schuttke at Coral Dreams dive shop on Contadora Island in Las Perlas. Guillermo was a tremendous help, and used his decades of experience in Las Perlas to help us find the fish we were looking for quickly. Overall it was a great trip, and I hope to return to Panama in the near future for more collections. Thanks to everyone who helped us get our fish.
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