Hook, Line, and Specimen

Ichthyologist Karsten Hartel follows the lure of rare species of fish

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

Monognathus berteli is one ugly fish.

With gaping jaws, a short, stubby body and a long, thin tail, it could easily give a swimmer nightmares. Luckily, it's only three inches long.

Karsten Hartel knew he had something different as soon as he saw it.

Hartel, a curatorial associate in ichthyology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), pulled the only known specimen of the fish, a kind of deep sea eel, from a research vessel's net in the northwestern Indian Ocean in 1995. He was working an overnight shift, hauling in specimens from between 1,000 and 1,500 meters, when Monognathus berteli came up in the net.

"We caught this thing and I immediately thought, 'This is new,' " Hartel said.

Consultation with a Danish colleague, Jorgen Nielsen, confirmed his suspicion. He and Nielsen decided to name the fish after a deceased colleague, Erik Bertelsen, who had done a great deal of work on similar deep sea eels.

As a curatorial associate, Hartel oversees the MCZ's fishes collections -- six rooms filled with shelf after shelf crowded with bottles of preserved fish, some 1.2 million of them.

The collection, which contains specimens that date as far back as 1790, is something of a library of fishes of the world, Hartel said. The museum hosts visitors from all over the world and fields weekly requests from scientists wanting to examine specimens in the collection. And if the researcher can't come to the museum, the museum will often ship the specimen to the researcher, Hartel said.

"That's the backbone of the collection: using it. It shouldn't be viewed as static," Hartel said. "It's used in all forms of zoology: systematics, nomenclature, anatomy, biodiversity."

Hartel's duties include a wide range of administrative tasks, from personnel management to corresponding with other museums and fish experts worldwide.

But Hartel not only oversees the collections, he works to expand them. He has taken part in collecting trips in North, Central, and South America and has participated in 13 oceanic expeditions in the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, and Southern oceans.

Since he took over as curatorial associate 20 years ago, the size of the museum's fish collection has tripled. Harvard's largest acquisition in recent years came in the late 1970s, when the collection of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was moved to Harvard.

Around that time, Hartel also noticed that the museum's collection had few freshwater fish from Massachusetts, its home state. Since then he has spent innumerable weekends remedying that situation, catching fish in the rivers, lakes, and ponds of Massachusetts and adding them to the museum's collection. Along the way, he and two co-authors have written a book on the subject, Inland Fishes of Massachusetts, that is being edited and will be published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Always Interested in Nature

Hartel, 54, grew up not far from Harvard, in Boston's Jamaica Plain section. He developed a love of nature at the Children's Museum near Jamaica Pond. Hartel and several friends could always be found there, he said, attending summer natural history programs designed for schoolchildren.

From there, he attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, working in fisheries programs over the summers and gaining a bachelor's degree in wildlife biology in 1974. He came to the MCZ in 1975 "at the ground level," as he put it, and rose to his current position within a few years.

Hartel's colleagues describe him as gregarious, likable, and very knowledgeable about the entire natural world, not just that below the water's surface. Jose Rosado, curatorial associate in herpetology at the MCZ, said he and Hartel have gone on several collecting trips together and he's been impressed by Hartel's understanding of the regions where they travel.

"I'd consider him one of the leading naturalists here; he's a well-rounded individual," Rosado said.

Hartel has worked to computerize information on the museum's collections and has participated in several cooperative initiatives to make collection information available on the Internet.

An amateur bird-watcher, Hartel has a home page that includes a photograph, taken near the Azores Islands, of him and a storm petrel, a bird found all over the Atlantic Ocean.

Fishing in the Deep Blue Sea

The collecting trips themselves are often possible because of Harvard's close relationship with Woods Hole, Hartel said.

When extra berths are available on a Woods Hole research vessel, the research institution will sometimes invite Hartel to join. Those opportunities usually come on short notice and only occur about every other year or so, but they permit research that could not be wholly funded by the University.

The trips last an average of five weeks and researchers often work at night to catch fish that migrate upward during the dark hours. The night hours also allow the researchers to avoid conflicting with other research being done by the ship.

Though the trips were initially exciting, Hartel confesses the reality of working all night while being at sea for four or five weeks at a time can be tough.

Hartel remains committed to the work, though. Very little is known about the deep ocean. For example, 14 species of deep sea eels are related to Monognathus berteli, but only 50 to 70 specimens of those species have been found in the entire world.

"This job has enabled me to do a lot of interesting things, meet a lot of interesting people, and contribute to national and international efforts to preserve species," Hartel said.