Alfred Kyrollos

Student dives in for Caribbean fish

by Joe O’Connell

Visit the New Eng­land Aquarium and you may see a fish caught by North­eastern stu­dent Alfred Kyrollos, S’15.

Last month, the biology stu­dent got the rare oppor­tu­nity to travel to the Bahamas for the Aquarium’s bian­nual, 10-​​day fish col­lecting expe­di­tion to increase its Caribbean coral reef population.

This was a once-​​in-​​a-​​lifetime oppor­tu­nity,” Kyrollos said. “We were trying to catch fish that best exhib­ited the diver­sity of the Caribbean coral reef.”

Kyrollos ini­tially con­nected with the Aquarium in 2011, when his diving skills earned him a co-​​op posi­tion in the Aquarium’s sig­na­ture Giant Ocean Tank, where stu­dents feed the fish and main­tain the 200,000-gallon chamber.

Time man­age­ment was some­thing you needed to know well because you are run­ning the show,” Kyrollos recalled. “The co-​​op also taught me lead­er­ship skills, which have res­onated through the rest of my col­lege and co-​​op experiences.”

During his co-​​op, the tank under­went a series of major ren­o­va­tions, requiring the fish be cap­tured and moved to dif­ferent loca­tions in the Aquarium. Kyrollos had a knack for catching fish, a talent that earned him an invite on the expe­di­tion to the Bahamas.

The expe­di­tion team, made up pri­marily of Aquarium staff, dove three or four times a day in order to col­lect a total of 600 fish, which were kept in wells on the expedition’s vessel.

Kyrollos’ most rewarding catch was a scor­pion fish, which he and his diving partner snagged using an empty jar that had been filled with peanut butter cov­ered raisins. The scor­pion fish is toxic to other fish, he said, and thus can’t be stored in a com­munal catch bag.

His expe­di­tion was funded by one of the Provost’s Under­grad­uate Research and Cre­ative Endeavors Awards, which offer finan­cial and aca­d­emic sup­port to North­eastern stu­dents seeking to con­duct orig­inal projects of their own design.

Kyrollos will leverage what he learned from the expe­ri­en­tial learning oppor­tu­nity and author a research paper titled “Sus­tain­able methods of fish col­lec­tion and trans­port for aquaria,” an in-​​depth obser­va­tion and analysis of fish col­lec­tion from ocean to tank.

So many people are catching fish using unsus­tain­able methods,” Kyrollos said. “They are unknow­ingly using methods that could hurt the envi­ron­ment they are fishing in. It’s nec­es­sary to update the status of best prac­tices and point out some poten­tial problems.”

Originally published in news@Northeastern on November 21, 2014

Photo courtesy Alfred Kyrollos

College of Science