Alejandro Zuniga ’12

Major

Molecular Biology

Project Title

Alien Species in South African River Systems

I assisted Professor Tony Booth, Head of the Department of Ichthyology at Rhodes University, with three small research projects related to fish populations in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. The first project we completed was to analyze a program for individual fish identification and to create an algorithm to optimize its results, which could then be used to estimate coelacanth population size. The second involved surveying river systems in the area to learn which fish were present and in which stage of life and to compare this data with that collected in the summer. The third project involved analyzing the impact of invasive catfish on invertibrate populations used as food by setting up cages in several different rivers and surveying the changes on a regular basis.



Internship Year

2010

Project Category

Development

Mentor(s)

Dan Rubenstein, Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology. Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Director, Program in African Studies. Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology