7 October 2025. Its been a truly wild last few days. In Dichato, we were racing against time to get all the setup ready, including an emergency overnight trip by bus to Santiago retrieve the missing chillers from a central aquarium store, and a Saturday morning frenzied work session to get everything up and running before the first sampling trip to the north. On Saturday night Hannes flew to the desert city of Iquique at 20S, a place of unreal beauty and harsh landscapes of sand, rocks, and ocean.
Thanks to the incredible help and expertise from local collaborators Prof. Miguel Araya and Dr. Cristian Asocars, the Sunday (5 Oct) morning fishing via gill net was almost to good to be true. With just one cast, we caught upwards of 400 Chilean silversides, all running ripe perhaps inspired - as we often found for northern hemisphere silversides - by the full moon. The fertilization in the boat and then transport of the embryos back to the lab via airplane all went without problems - a rare moment to cherish as an experimenter.
The kicker? The same full moon also appeared to entice the silversides in Dichato, and so a spontaneous fisherman went out with Hannes Tuesday night to - lo and behold - again catch all the fish, all running ripe, we needed to start the second population of the experiment.
48 hours. 2 populations more than thousand miles apart sampled and brought as embryos into the common garden experiment. Maybe I should consider a generous offering to San Pedro, the saint of the fishermen whose statue is in everything fishing harbor in Chile.