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Deepest river in the world, new species

Ned Gardiner, a scientist who specializes in mapping ecosystems, is fiddling with an instrument floating over the side of our wooden pirogue when the boat emerges from an eddy into the main stream of the Congo River. The transition from the still water to the turbulent flow swings the bow downstream and nearly knocks Gardiner into the water. “Almost fell into the drink, eh?” he says with a laugh, though he knows a swim here could be dangerous, even deadly. The Congo is flowing at 1.25 million cubic feet of water per second, enough to fill 13 Olympic-size swimming pools every second. Gardiner, who works for the National Climatic Data Center, in Ashville, North Carolina, is here because he thinks the Lower Congo may contain the deepest point of any river in the world.

We’re in Central Africa, 90 miles west of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital of Kinshasa and about 100 miles east of where the river drains into the Atlantic Ocean, ending its 3,000-mile run across equatorial Africa. A series of grassy hills called the Crystal Mountains rise subtly behind us. Gardiner and John Shelton, a hydrologist from the United States Geologic Survey, are plotting how water moves in such a massive flow. To do this, they brought along an instrument that floats alongside a boat in an orange, plastic vessel about the size of an elementary-school desk. The instrument maps water movement and measures the river’s depth. Gardiner tried to accomplish the same thing last year with a device designed for rivers. “The signal petered out well before the bottom,” he explains, his hand skimming the river’s surface. “So we bought one for oceans.”

We’re midstream, heading from the north bank to the south, on a course directly perpendicular to the current. If we manage to keep the instrument from being swallowed by one of the 40-foot-wide whirlpools studding the flow, Shelton and Gardiner’s work will produce a digital cross section of the river’s currents and depth.

The Congo’s power—its depth, speed and turbulence—is of particular interest to ichthyologist Melanie Stiassny of the American Museum of Natural History, one of the scientists in our expedition. She studies fish on the lower Congo and over the past decade has discovered six new species (she’s working on identifying three more). The number of species known to live in the lower Congo now exceeds 300 and the river contains one of the highest concentrations of "endemism," or species found nowhere else in the world. Stiassny thinks the river’s power is shaping evolution in the Congo.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Evolution-in-the-Deepest-River-in-the-World.html#ixzz0WCNmMCVZNed Gardiner, a scientist who specializes in mapping ecosystems, is fiddling with an... more