Can you identify this African characin?

[Julian Humphries]

As something of a test I am interested in the power of the Net to assist me
in everyday curatorial tasks.  So this is somewhat of a test of the
mechanism, although the actual problem is real.

I am curious to see both whether there are people reading this who can
answer such questions as species identifications and whether the method of
depositing a image on a gopher server is a good way to supply the "raw"
material.

I have a characin from northeastern Zaire, state of Equateur.  I have tried
keys to Western Africa characins with little success.  Gery is almost
worthless for this kind of thing.  I am hoping that this species is common
enough that someone may recognize it directly from the picture which is
located on the biodiversity gopher at huh.harvard.edu (port 70).  The file
is called characin.gif and is located in
collection_catlogs/by_institution/cornell.

The fish has biserial premax. teeth, but I am not sure what else is
important.  Let me know if more characters are needed.

Oh, the picture is only fair because I simply placed the specimen directly
on my HP scanner and grabbed a grey scale image.  I think if I played
around a bit with the specimen and image inhancement I could get a slightly
better picture, but too much time and this kind of thing becomes
self-defeating.

Let me know what you think or send an identification if you can.

Thanks,

Julian Humphries
The Vertebrate Collections and The MUSE Project, Cornell University
Building 3, Research Park
83 Brown Road
Ithaca, NY  14850

Voice: 607-257-8143
Fax:   607-257-8109
Email: jmh3 at cornell.edu