SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A seemingly unique fish pulled from Great Slave Lake near Yellowknife two summers ago has turned out to be a member of species of cisco already known to science.

As it turns out, the "googly-eyed" cisco, or Coregonus googelii as it was dubbed by biologists, is a variety of Arctic cisco known as the least cisco, or by its Latin name Coregonus sardinella - a close relative of other ciscoes and whitefishes. What is new, however, is the knowledge that this species exists in Great Slave Lake.

"It's been identified as most probably belonging to the Arctic assemblage of ciscoes and not what is typically inhabiting Great Slave Lake - the Laurentian Great Lake ciscoes that re-invaded the system post-glacially," said Paul Vecsei, a biologist with Golder Associates who was involved in the original discovery.

The least cisco has a circumpolar distribution and is found in both North America and northern Asia.

Vecsei said they considered the possibility that their discovery from two years ago near the Sub Islands of Yellowknife Bay could be part of this Arctic group of ciscoes "early on in the game" but photos of Coregonus sardinella sent to Vecsei and his colleagues from other researchers in Alaska showed a fish that appeared nothing like those they had found in their nets.

The "googly-eye" has conspicuously large eyes and dark fins.

"These (ciscoes) are not unique to Great Slave Lake, but the shape - the design of what you see in appearance - is unique to Great Slave Lake and some of the populations more directly north," said Vecsei.

There are two other mysterious ciscoes, however, that Vecsei and his team have discovered and are still unable to identify them.

"There is another cisco we caught ... in the great depth of the East Arm that was very different from other ciscoes we caught and that we still can't, to this day, classify," said Vecsei.

Like the googly-eye, the "big-eye cisco" also comes equipped with a large set of eyeballs. It is a small fish and has small fins, and Vecsei is unsure if it's an ancient relic, or a variation of an already known species that has found its own niche in Great Slave Lake much like the googly-eye, which he thinks is a good possibility.

"It's a dwarf, it's small, you don't need to be big when you're in such a low productivity environment, and its big eyes help in the dark for feeding - there you go, you have a big-eye cisco," said Vecsei.

Another unique-looking cisco was found this year in Marian Lake and in the North Arm of Great Slave Lake, which is an unusual habitat for ciscoes, said Vecsei, because ciscoes are usually associated with clear, deep water not those that are silty and shallow.

"It looks like it's almost missing that section of where the body becomes the tail - it looks like the body ends and the tail is just attached on," said Vecsei.

He said the first time they caught one they thought it was just deformed, but then they caught many others with the exact same characteristics.

"We've caught many of them and they are something way off the scale morphologically than anything I've seen," said Vecsei.

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