New book dishes on over 200 Arctic fishes

The late Don McAllister, an ichthyologist and curator with the Canadian Museum of Nature, spent years gathering fish samples for a new book on Arctic marine fish. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE)

This large-eye snaggletooth fish is recorded in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Arctic fish collection of more than 70,000 specimens. The collection provides baseline data for taxonomic and geographic information included in a new book on Canada’s Arctic marine fish. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE)

This top view of a bloated Hartel’s swallower (Chiasmodon harteli) shows that the fish has a belly full of recently caught supper. (PHOTO BY JOHN L. TOTTENHAM)

Some Arctic char migrate to the sea for part of the year, while others live a full life in fresh waters. (PHOTO BY NEIL MOCHNACZ)

Cover art for a book on fishes in Canada’s marine waters released recently by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Museum of Nature. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS)

Of all the fish in the sea, it’s fish from the Arctic that have been hard to catch up on. A new book, titled Marine Fishes of Arctic Canada, changes that.

The 600-page text, written by researchers with the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, is the first comprehensive reference guide to marine fish of the Canadian North.

It features 221 species of fish, from common types like char and halibut, to rare swimmers like the deep-water boa dragonfish, which has only been documented in the Arctic a few times.

“I consider the book as a key baseline for the Canadian Arctic marine system in terms of fish biodiversity and occurrence,” said DFO scientist Jim Reist, who co-edited the book with museum researcher Brian Coad. “As a baseline it can be used to act as documentation against which changes in the system can be compared.”

Changes to the Arctic fish system could be related to circumstances such as a changing climate, an increase in shipping and an expanding fishery.

“With climate change we do predict that there are going to be more North Atlantic species coming up and more North Pacific species coming in,” said Noel Alfonso, a senior research assistant with the Canadian Museum of Nature, who authored the book’s chapter on flatfish.

That’s why DFO and the Canadian Museum of Nature are calling this book timely. But the text, which includes about 30 more fish than previously recorded, has been decades in the making.

The reference book harkens back to an effort made by the Fisheries Research Board of Canada in the late 1960s to make a series of compendium works on fishes of Canada, Jim Reist said.

Those other reference books on Canadian fishes were made in the 70s and 80s.

“The missing piece was the Arctic marine fishes,” he said.

The bulk of the research for the book began with work by the late Don McAllister, who was curator of ichthyology at the Canadian Museum of Nature from 1958 to 1986. He died in 2001, but his work to expand the museum’s catalogue of Arctic fish records made its collection one of the best for Arctic fishes globally.

Ichthyology is a sub-science of zoology, focusing on fish.

For McAllister, sometimes this research meant setting nets and scuba diving in frigid waters. “He was an old school ichthyologist—get your hands wet, get dirty and get right in there and figure it out,” Reist said of his colleague and mentor. “He was very passionate about fish and ichthyology.”

Of the 221 fish in the book, Noel Alfonso said the largest range of species come from Canada’s eastern Arctic, where marine depth means there are fish living in the top, middle and bottom of the water column.

“A lot of those deep species are the classic sort of scary deep-water fish,” he said. That’s fish like the Lycodes frigidus, or the glacial eelpout. The species is the northernmost fish recorded in Canada, though it is also found in Norwegian, Greenlandic and Chukchi seas, Alfonso said.

In the western Arctic, waters are shallower and the salinity around the Beaufort Sea is low because of huge volumes of fresh and warmer water coming up from the MacKenzie River. That’s where you get more fish like Arctic char and types of white fish, he said.

“Each species has its own section. A description, an illustration, scientific name, and common name in English, French or Inuktitut, depending,” Alfonso said of the text’s format. “There are sections on taxonomy of the species, a physical description, a section on habitat, biology, economic and cultural importance, distribution and key references.”

Besides a backgrounder on each Arctic fish, readers will get a history of Arctic fish research, information on fish collection and preservation, and an essay on traditional knowledge of Arctic fish ecology.

Some fun facts from the book include:

• Four shark species are documented in the Canadian Arctic. They are the black dogfish, the Portuguese shark, the deep-sea cat shark and the Greenland shark.

• The shrimp- and squid-eating Greenland halibut, also known as turbot, can weigh as much as 50 kilograms.

• The fish family called Zoarcids or eelpouts has 32 different species, even though they are very hard to tell apart.

• One of the most rare fish in the book is scientifically called a Bythites fuscus and was first collected in 1834 near Greenland. It has only been recorded twice since, in 2000 off the coast of Baffin Island.

• The oldest reference used in the book is from a sample taken by scientist John Richardson, who was also a ship’s doctor on the Franklin expedition. The reference is for the Coregonus artedi, a fish commonly known as a cisco or lake herring, which Richardson recorded seeing near the mouth of the Coppermine River.

“While none of the 221 species are new to science, this broad diversity covers fishes found in the eastern and western Arctic, along the coasts, and up to the most northern reaches of Canada’s Arctic Ocean,” said a Feb. 19 release by the Canadian Museum of Nature.

The University of Toronto Press published the book. Like most textbooks, it’s pricey, but you can buy it on sale on the publisher’s website.

Now that the book is out, the DFO and the Canadian Museum of Nature are continuing to partner on the creation of a public database that will share a collection of maps from the book that show the species distribution of Canadian Arctic fishes.

This means maps of where the fish can be found geographically in Arctic waters. Reist expects this resource will be available by the end of this year.