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Researchers back collecting fish in Slave More study required to determine if oil sands affecting northern riverPaul Bickford Northern News Services Published Monday, November 7, 2011
This was the second visit to the two communities by the researchers from the University of Saskatchewan. "We brought our whole crew back up again and conducted another collection of fish. What we're trying to do is get some sort of perspective on the health of the fish throughout the year and to do that we need to sample at multiple time points," said team leader Dr. Paul Jones, an associate professor at the university's School of Environment and Sustainability. The team previously visited in June. While in Fort Smith, Jones addressed an Oct. 4 public meeting to present some "very preliminary" results from the study. "We still got a lot of the samples in chemical analysis," he told News/North. "We're only just getting the data back now. As far as some of the health and some of the deformity questions that people have had, I've got to go through and look at the numbers statistically, but there was not a large incidence of deformities and malformations. You couldn't really detect trends up and down the river, either." Many more fish need to be sampled before any final conclusions can be made, he said. "The more we look at, the more chance we have of detecting some of the anomalies." The researchers found only a couple of skin lesions on fish collected in the summer. "What we've done is, when we saw those, we sampled them. We preserved them and they will be going to a pathologist for diagnostic examination to determine whether those are viral, whether they occurred as wounds that were healing or something like that, or whether they were truly some sort of deformity or tumour on the fish," Jones said, adding that will determine if the lesions were natural or caused by some kind of contamination.
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