15 October 2025. While the embryos from Iquique and Dichato develop and now begin to hatch in the warmest temperatures, Hannes and Claudio took a quick trip to get embryos from a third population at ~ 30S. It's where the Chilean coast is as wild and rugged as anywhere else, but the trees have already given way to prickly shrubs and lots and lots of cacti - the desert begins. It's also the area around the big double city of Coquimbo/La Serena, where already in 2023 we ran into trouble finding pejerrey, let alone spawning ripe ones. Back then, we thought of it as an aberration, something surely owed to the strong El Niño phenomenon of 2023 - but nothing permanent.

And so here we are again. And to our chagrin, again the fishermen in the Coquimbo fish market just shrug and point to the pejerrey they sell. No, those are not local at all; they are from the south of Chile in Puerto Montt.

So again we follow our instincts back to the small cove, where we had some (some!) luck the last time around - Caleta Sierra. Again we meet up with Mauricio Vega, the fisherman who wants to help us. And again we try at night and in the morning to row a gill net around a stretch of the small pebble beach of the cove and then pulling it ashore. We do catch all kinds of fish that way, just not the ones we are after! In total, the whole effort netted no more than five pejerrey, all but one unripe.

We return empty handed, pondering the truism that nature just doesn't care about science projects. To me, it seems timely to rethink whether this species truly has a continuous or perhaps discontinuous distribution along the Chilean/Peruvian coast.