Odontesthes regia

Chilean silversides are spawning in Iquique and Dichato

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.

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The day of fertilization, the cell division in the fertilized embryos is beginning.

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Cristian Azocar recovering the gill net full of spawning ripe silversides

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On 6 October 2025, Hannes gave a spontaneous talk in front of students and faculty of the Marine Science Department of the University Arturo Prat (UNAP) in Iquique

Hannes back in Chile to repeat common garden experiment!

25. September 2025. I have been asked by quite a few people (on both hemispheres), why I had to go again to Chile, to the same place, the same marine station, to repeat the same experiment from two years ago? Did the first fail somehow? No, not at all. The first experiment yielded really intriguing data suggesting similar local adaptation patterns in southern compared to northern hemisphere silversides.

But the catch is that one year could be a coincidence. To make statistically robust inferences about the nature of local adaptation in Chilean silversides, good science simply demands another, a second independent data set of observations. Even more so, because (i) the adaptation strength here is likely subtle, and (ii) some treatments and populations were indeed less successful the first time around.

And so I'm here again. The place where I spent 6 months during my sabbatical feels wonderfully familiar - despite being thousands of miles away from home. The setting September sun pours gold over the halfmoon-shaped Coliumo Bay. Spring is in the air here, but the little beach town is still mostly void of the summer crowds. I wander through the streets, recognize the stray dogs, and many of the people in this little village say they remember me and my family from two years ago.

In the marine station, the experiment is now being set up in a different location. Inside the aquarium, which is climate-controlled and therefore more suitable. It took us two years to gain permission to move in, and I had to have custom tanks made to set it all up. Will it all be worth it?

Now time is really tight, the setup needs to be put together in just a few days, because in the low latitudes of Chile's north, the spawning season of pejerrey has already begun. Fingers crossed.

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On 26 September 2025, Claudio Gallardo flexes off some tank material to make it fit

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Tight, but this is what will have to do!

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Plumbing begins in the Aquarium of the Marine Station in Dichato

Hannes starts sabbatical research in Chile

17 Juli 2023. Hannes just moved for 5 months to a small village called Dichato near Concepción in south-central Chile to build and then conduct a large common garden experiment on the Chilean silverside Odontesthes regia.

It's still early, disorienting days - but thanks to the ever optimistic Mauricio Urbina, the collaborator on this project, the mood is good and full of anticipation.

Want to learn more? The Chilean silverside page has it.

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Sun over Dichato at Coliumo Bay on 22 July 2023

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Fishing boat in Dichato. In the background is the Marine Station.

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A dead purple sea urchin