Over the last 20 years ichthyologist Barry Chernoff has collected more than a quarter-million fish in the lakes, ponds, and rivers of South America. He has also collected many tales of survival, including the time parasitic nematodes burrowed into his intestines, and the time his appendix ruptured on a lonely tributary of the Amazon and a Peruvian military jet flew to the rescue. As a curator of the department of zoology at the Field Museum in Chicago for 17 years, he concentrated on tracing South American specimens to a time when dinosaurs roamed Earth. Last fall Chernoff, 53, became the Robert Schumann Professor of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he also teaches in both the biology and the earth and environmental sciences departments.
One of my earliest memories is of walking on the dock of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn with my mom and dad when a guy who was fishing pulled up a horseshoe crab. All the people around were shrieking and screaming at this monster. And my father, being the brave person he has always been, kicked it off the dock.
Photograph by Celio Magalhaes, courtesy of Barry Chernoff
In July 1999 Barry Chernoff traveled to the Pastaza River, in the mountains above Consuelo, Ecuador, to work with a conservation organization, AquaRAP, that he helped found. “What AquaRAP tries to do,” he says, “is give people the best information possible so they can work together to make a sustainable future.”
