The “Fish of the Future” is a freshwater canary?
The slimy sculpin is really no slimier than any other fish but does have a lot of great things going for it.
We review the biology and ecology of slimy sculpin and why we believe it is the “fish of the future” for environmental monitoring.
When we want to know if a river or stream is healthy, we want to be able to study an organism that is abundant, doesn’t move around much, and has easy to measure characteristics like size, sex, and reproductive output including number of eggs and number of offspring.
If the organism we have selected reflects local conditions, we are more confident that when we detect a change in that organism, the change indicates that a stressor of some sort has entered and is affecting the environment.
Ideally this indicator (or sentinel) species can be used as an early warning of some environmental change or hazard that can be mitigated or reversed — like a canary in a coalmine.
The slimy sculpin is a relatively small fish (up to ~8–10cm long) that lives entirely on the bottom of streams and rivers and doesn’t move long distances.
They can be found in almost all cool-water streams from Virginia west- and northward to Alaska, inhabiting a large part of North America’s fresh water. They are generally abundant, easy to collect and measure, and have been used in a wide variety of studies assessing the effects of human inputs into fresh water including those from diamond mines, pulp mill and sewage effluents, row-crop agriculture, oil sands, metal mines, and timber harvest activities.
By considering the utility, ecology, and reproductive biology of slimy sculpin, this fish is a good fit for the job of indicator species. Our review provides insights, based on more than 10 years of study, into the timing and methods of sculpin collection that will aid in the interpretation of sculpin monitoring studies.
Read the full paper — The biology and ecology of slimy sculpin: A recipe for effective environmental monitoring by Michelle A. Gray, R. Allen Curry, Tim J. Arciszewski, Kelly R. Munkittrick and Sandra M. Brasfield on the FACETS website.
