Calling all ice fishers: New Brunswick Museum wants in on your catch

You might think the New Brunswick Museum has plenty of fish. It boasts an entire room stuffed wall-to-wall with them, hundreds of jars of preserved fish, including every freshwater species found in the province and many found in the Bay of Fundy.   

But it wants more.

The museum, located in uptown Saint John, has "gaps" in its collection, zoology technician Gayathri Sreedharan said, and it's hoping the province's ice fishers can help.

It plans to put out an open call, asking them to donate some of their catch.  

"We have very few winter collections of New Brunswick fish and we are hoping to try to fill those gaps," Sreedharan said.

The current collection is rich with fish collected during summer months, but ice is an obvious impediment during the winter months, Sreedharan said.

As well, many species go through a variety of changes during winter months that aren't well represented in the museum's acquisitions. 

Burbot, a New Brunswick freshwater fish with a "unique" reproductive biology, is a good example of that, Sreedharan said.

"They actually spawn in the winter under the ice," she said. "They're common in the St. John River, but we have under 10 specimens in the collection." 

Collecting different species, from different locations around the province during different times of the year, gives researchers a wealth of information that can be used to study a variety of topics. 

"We can look at the impacts of things like climate change or pollution on things like biodiversity loss or population shifts," said Sreedharan. 

"When you think about historical collections, they would have been collected at a time when we didn't know what DNA was, let alone how to extract it," she said. 

"Today, genetics work on historical collections is providing baseline data that we can actually compare to current data." 

Some of the oldest preserved fish in the province can be found at the museum.