Fish and Wildlife
CSI: Walleye
Feature story posted on October 4, 2007
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Lindsey Burke studies a walleye fin in the lab. |
There’s nothing fishy about it at all: Lindsey Burke has an af-fin-ity for DNA.
The forensic scientist, who is on leave from her job at the RCMP crime lab, has gone back to school to apply her skills to the walleye.
Burke is doing her masters degree in biological sciences at the University of Alberta, and has just started the second year of her research project, which is documenting the DNA of approximately 1,300 walleye from the Athabasca River and 11 northern Alberta lakes.
“The techniques we’re using in this lab are the same as in the crime lab,” she says.
Burke hopes that the results of her project will have two practical and important applications for Alberta’s fisheries: to keep the province’s walleye genetically strong, and to give the government a new tool to catch fish poachers.
She is hypothesizing that walleye populations from different lakes will be, due to isolation and lack of movement between Alberta’s water basins, genetically different from one another.
The information gathered through the research project should help fish managers in Alberta maintain that genetic diversity. “Generally, high genetic diversity means a genetically healthy population,” she says. “From a fishery management perspective, if we know what we’re starting with, hopefully it will make it easier for us to keep it and maintain the natural genetic diversity of walleye in Alberta.”
Her work also has the potential to help fish managers better evaluate the success of their walleye stocking programs. “At some lakes, there are questions of whether it’s the natural walleye surviving or the stocked ones that are surviving,” she explains. “It might be possible, through DNA analysis, to determine whether the majority of walleye found in a stocked lake are the stocked source, or the remnants of the original population that has made a comeback.”
Her work also has potential as a crime-fighting tool, helping Fish and Wildlife enforcement officers nab fish poachers because the walleye-DNA databases will help match poached fish to a specific lake or other body of water. “A fish looks like it could be from any lake,” says Burke. “If people are harvesting from lakes that are under strict management, it would be helpful to enforce those regulations. Officers could even go into someone’s freezer, a restaurant or a supermarket to take a sample. They wouldn’t have to apprehend individuals in the act of poaching.”
And what would happen if Burke’s DNA analysis showed all walleye in Alberta are genetically the same? “It would be a very short thesis,” she says with a laugh.
But, she adds, “It’s not like we’re going into this with no prior knowledge. There have been similar studies done in Ontario, Quebec and in the United States where walleye are native, and they have found genetic diversity between lakes.”
Burke’s work is being funded by Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, the Cumulative Environmental Management Association of Alberta, and the Alberta Conservation Association.
