The deepwater sculpin is not an attractive fish by any conventional standard. You won’t find it hanging on a plaque or landing a feature role in a Disney movie.
What you might say about the bottom-dweller is that it’s a survivor, having managed to eke out an existence at the bottom of Canada’s deepest and coldest lakes since the last ice age.
Researchers at U of T Scarborough are now sequencing its entire genome to see how this seemingly unremarkable fish has been able to adapt to such extreme environments.
“It’s an iconic Canadian survivor,” says Nathan Lovejoy, a professor in the department of biology whose lab is doing the genetics research on the sculpin thanks to a grant from the CanSeq150Opens an external site in a new window initiative.
Read more at: University of Toronto
Relatively little is known about the deepwater sculpin because it lives at such great depths (Photo Credit: Brian Weidel, U.S. Geological Survey)