BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The LSU Museum of Natural Sciences’ top fish specialist has won a half-million-dollar grant to study the family tree of fish called heroine cichlids (SIK’-lids).
Ichthyology (IK’-thee-ah-luh-gee) curator Prosanta Chakrabarty says the $520,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will help him do a great deal of work unraveling the cichlid family. He says it also will let him hire post-doctoral students and train workers from some of the areas where he collects specimens.
Cichlids are some of the most popular recreational and aquarium fishes in the world. There are more than 2,000 species.
Chakrabarty has been at LSU a bit more than a year. In that time, he also has found two new species of batfish in the Gulf of Mexico.
 
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