ETYFISH NAME OF THE WEEK #622

Nothobranchius taiti Nagy 2019
The original description of this seasonal killifish from Uganda, like most descriptions of new taxa, is dry and clinical, written in the dispassionate language of science. Material and methods. Biostatistical compilations of morphometric and meristic data. Coloration. Distribution. Ecology. Graphs and tables. Everything that is known about this species except …

The exciting tale of obsession and perseverance behind its discovery.

Fortunately, ichthyologist Béla Nagy, who described Nothobranchius taiti in 2019, has supplied that tale — and several others — in an entertaining memoir of his adventures collecting seasonal killifishes in "Africa: Rough Road into the Deep Unknown: Adventures of Discovery and Survival in Africa" (2025). The tale begins with museum specimens of a killifish in Uganda collected from a muddy swamp by Colin C. Tait, a fish ranger, in 1969 and 1971 and never seen again. Nagy was haunted by Tait’s field photo of the fish. It was an “enigma,” he said, “a ghost hidden in the waters.” “Was it still out there,” Nagy asked himself, “hidden in some forgotten pool?” Had previous explorers, including himself, simply looked in the wrong place? The more he thought about it, the more he realized he had to try again. In June 2017, he returned to Uganda, determined to “chase a mystery that had evaded everyone” for nearly 50 years.

Nagy and his collecting partners drove north through Uganda for several days, retracing the path Tait had taken decades before. The heat was oppressive, as were Nagy’s growing doubts about his chances of success. They stopped at every temporary pool or pond they encountered. Their nets came up empty, or yielding only Notobranchius ugandensis, a common killifish in Uganda. Heavy mud from the ponds clung to their legs. Exhaustion set in. The “weight of repeated failure” pressed on their minds. Just “another day of mud and disappointment,” one of the collectors said. But they kept looking.

They veered down a smaller dirt road to a place where the seasonal Arapi River crossed the track. The water was dark and stagnant. The mud heavy and slick. Nagy smelled the rotting vegetation drifting up from the surface.

“I would regret it for the rest of my life if we did not try,” Nagy said. The first drag of his net came up empty. He swept it again. This time the net contained two “small, wriggling bodies.” Females. Just then, one of the other collectors shouted, “I have the male.” The male has banded fins, different from all other Nothobranchius species in Uganda. They had found it.

“The weight of fatigue lifted,” Nagy writes. “The long hours, the uncertainty the relentless search, had all led us to this magical moment. We stood in the shallow water, the midday heat beating down, grinning like fools.”

Oddly, Nagy did not provide an etymology in his 2019 description of the fish. But elsewhere, including this book, he confirmed that he named it in honor of Colin C. Tait. In addition to first collecting and photographing the fish, Tait had also published field observations about Nothobranchius habitats in Zambia, as well as notes on their behavior in captivity. He was described by a colleague as “marvellous company to have in the long dark nights in the bush, with his love of jokes, and his fund of songs and stories.”

PHOTO: Nothobranchius taiti, paratype, male, 35.3 mm SL. Photographed by Béla Nagy after two weeks in captivity. From: Nagy, B. 2019. Nothobranchius taiti, a new species of annual killifish from the upper Nile drainage in Uganda (Teleostei: Nothobranchiidae). Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters 29 (1): 19–31.