Windsor prof lands $50,000 grant to help endangered minnows
Trevor Pitcher, director of the University of Windsor’s Freshwater Restoration Ecology Centre in LaSalle, received a $50,000 grant this week to help save an endangered minnow. Jonathan Wilkinson, the minister of fisheries, oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, announced Thursday that the federal government was formally launching the Canada Nature Fund for Aquatic Species at Risk. It’s a $55-million investment over five years to aid the recovery of aquatic species at risk.
The $50,000 grant for Pitcher’s research will help the endangered redside dace, which has a bright red stripe when spawning and can leap out of the water to snag insects. He is studying the minnows as a model of how to successfully reintroduce species at risk back into the wild.
In Canada, the redside dace is only found in Ontario with most of the population in streams around the Greater Toronto Area. It had been in decline thanks to urbanization and streams that get too murky or warm.
Pitcher was allowed to take about 100 redside dace from Ohio last year to start breeding them in his LaSalle centre. He plans to study them and to build up enough of them to begin reintroducing the freshwater fish in the next three to five years in the Rouge River outside Toronto.
The funding for Pitcher’s research is one of six projects totalling more than $790,000 with some of the other funds going to help native trout in Alberta and lake sturgeon in Manitoba. Pitcher, a professor at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and at the university ’s biology department, will use the $50,000 grant to study genetic mechanisms of the minnow ’s thermal tolerance and to allow him to have more students working in his lab.