One fish, two fish, big fish, old fish – Just off your cottage’s dock, are there sturgeon or pike nearby?
Dr. Gary Anderson uses environmental DNA (eDNA) to detect fish without hooking a single specimen.
Sturgeon spawn only intermittently and are very sensitive to changes in their environment. Today, there are very few sturgeon left, some in the Assiniboine River, almost none in the Red River, and pockets of populations in the Winnipeg and Nelson River systems. They can be detected using environmental DNA (eDNA) that can detect molecules sloughed off by fish in the water, then assayed to detect their presence, all without physically hooking a single specimen.
