Graduate student writes pocket guide on Alberta fish

Matthew Morris may study fish every day — the three-spine stickleback to be precise — but it was his wife’s love of birdwatching that led him to write a pocket guide that documents 70 species of Alberta fish. It started when the PhD candidate in the Faculty of Science was at the bookstore buying his wife an illustrated, foldout pocket brochure called Calgary Birds.

“It was remarkably useful. We went out to Fish Creek Park and we were able to identify all sorts of birds using this guide,” he says. “I thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had something like this for fish,’ because I know in my own experience when I throw out minnow traps and scoop up fish I had no idea what I was looking at.”

So Morris approached Waterford Press, consulted with dozens of fish experts including field biologists at the university, provincial and federal biologists, Trout Unlimited, Stantec and others, and less than a year later, Alberta Fishes: A Folding Pocket Guide to All Known Native and Introduced Species, is hitting bookstore shelves around the province.

When we think of fish in Alberta, we think of “minnows and trout,” says Morris, but in fact we have upwards of 20 different minnow species alone. And one of them, the hybrid dace, is completely asexual — the females produce exact replicas of themselves without sperm penetrating their eggs.

“That’s one of the cool little facts we have in the guide that will hopefully get people excited and not just think about fish as that thing we have on our plate, but as actual species with adaptations and a group with amazing diversity that needs to be protected,” he says.

More than 50 of the species Morris documents are native to Alberta. The rest, including rainbow trout and brown trout, have been introduced. In Banff National Park, several tropical fish species were introduced into the hot springs in the 1920s and they “out-competed” a native species, the Banff longnose dace, into extinction in the 1980s.

“I really do echo Matthew’s notion that it’s our responsibility to try to help educate the public about our aquatic ecosystems,” says Sean Rogers, Morris’ supervisor and assistant professor in biological sciences. “This guide will help, whether it’s someone who is just out in nature, a novice naturalist, or an environmental scientist who is working in some of these areas.”

The guide will soon be stocked in select bookstores or you can order a copy online or call toll-free at 800-434-2555.