After the Second World War, a British scientist by the name of Rosemary Helen Lowe wanted to work as an entomologist. But in 1945, the Colonial Service refused to employ female entomologists. Instead of giving up on her ambition to become a field scientist, Lowe-McConnell, whose father was Liverpool’s deputy director of education at the time, turned to ichthyology, the study of fish.
That decision eventually took her to Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), a relatively small landlocked southeastern African nation, endowed with spectacular highlands and extensive lakes. She helped establish a laboratory and studied the freshwater fish of Lake Nyasa, now Lake Malawi. Her work on cichlids, particularly tilapia, became an important foundation for later studies of tropical fisheries and fish farming.
