Granted, they didn’t travel there on their own, but the tiny mummichog managed to meet NASA’s tough criteria for a trip to Skylab. Found in salty estuaries along the East Coast from the Maritimes to Georgia, researchers marvel at the mummichog’s hardiness and adaptability. “They’re cool,” Noah Bressman, an assistant professor at Salisbury University in Maryland, said in a telephone interview. “They can move on land. They can breathe air. They are extremely tolerant of a wide range of conditions. They live in the most extreme fish habitats.” Noah Bressman is an assistant professor at Salisbury University in Maryland. As an undergraduate, he discovered that mumichogs are able to use visual cues to find their way to water if trapped by a receding tide. (Salisbury University) Bressman has been studying the mummichog since his undergraduate days. “They also have these adorable smiles when you look at them,” Bressman said. “You can’t help but think, ‘Oh, that’s a cute little fish’ when you see it.” His interest in them was piqued one day when he was working on a sea table – essentially a large, low aquarium with about 10cm of water used to study fish in the laboratory. He noticed a mummichog on the floor, about three meters from the tank. Fish are known to jump and dive over land to reach nearby tidal pools. Derived from a native word, mummichog roughly translates to “moving in crowds”. The mummichog is a survivor, able to breathe air, withstand salt water and adapt to pollution. (Noah Bressman/Facebook) Bresman thought nothing of it, just a fish that had accidentally jumped the wrong way. “So I put it back in the tank and the next day, a different ‘mummy’ in the exact same spot, 10 feet away on the shiny floor. Like, that can’t be a coincidence.” Bressman decided to film the fish moving over land, using a high-speed camera. It was then that he noticed the mumichogs standing on their tails for a few tenths of a second between jumps. “And so this upright behavior, it seemed functionally unnecessary to do two consecutive jumps. So I thought, ‘What could they do?’ Maybe it reorients them because they have their eyes on the side of their head.” Bressman soon discovered that fish would always jump in the direction of a reflective surface, similar to sunlight shining on water. Put them in the dark and they’ll jump around randomly. “And so that spot where I found those two mumichogs originally, 10 feet away from the tank, that’s where the sunlight is shining … on the shiny tile floor,” Bresman said. “And that was my first huge science moment and I’ve been hooked on mumichogs ever since.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of mumichogs

ACAP workers haul a net near the mouth of the Little River in Saint John. They wear shoulder length latex gloves because the area is so contaminated. This is where mumichogs are often caught. (Steven Webb/CBC) Two workers with ACAP Saint John, a non-profit community organization focused on the local environment, drag a seine net through waist-deep water near the mouth of the Little River. Dressed in breastplates and wearing latex gloves that reach almost to the shoulder, they try to catch fish as part of a tracking program. As they move through the water, dark mud is stirred up from the bottom. Shauna Sands, ACAP’s conservation coordinator, said this location just off Bayside Drive is her least favorite location to work, describing the water as looking “like Mountain Dew,” the green-yellow soda. But Roxanne MacKinnon, the organization’s executive director, said that’s one of the places they’ll likely find mumichogs. ACAP Saint John workers Shauna Sands, left, Khoa Ngo, middle, and Shayelin Braydon look for small fish and shrimp in the net (Steven Webb/CBC) “We often find mummychogs here in Little River and also in Marsh Creek, on the front, which is one of our other fisheries and very occasionally we also find them in Spar Cove,” he said. “All of these areas are not the most pristine sites we have here in St. John. They are known [for] stormwater impacts, different fecal contamination issues and creosote contamination issues in all of these locations.” Mummichogs make their homes in places that are often abused by humans. But that means they are valuable to scientists studying the effects of pollution. Usually 7.5 to 9 centimeters long, they have a trunk and square tail fins, tiny sharp teeth and a prominent mandible, with colors similar to their surroundings. Their name comes from an indigenous word that roughly translates to “movements in crowds.” They have shown an incredible ability to adapt.

Go to space

NASA chose them over goldfish, another highly resilient species, because NASA scientists believed the fish had the best chance of surviving the launch. Not only did they survive the journey, but they appeared to adapt quickly to being in a bag of water in a weightless environment. They immediately oriented themselves to turn their backs to the light, just as they do to sunlight here on Earth. For a few weeks, they swam in tight loops, but eventually returned to their normal swimming patterns. But their ability to adapt here on Earth is so useful to scientists. Richard Di Giulio began studying mumichogs in the Elizabeth River near Norfolk, Wasigetta. Richard Di Giulio of Duke University has been studying mumichogs for nearly 30 years. He says their ability to adapt to chemical pollution is amazing. (Duke University) Some fish lived near several former lumber mills where creosote had seeped into the waterway for nearly a hundred years. The Duke University scientist said he became interested in them after researchers put mummichogs living in clean water into the polluted water the mummichogs had been living in for generations. “It’s so dramatic,” DiGiulio said in a telephone interview. “I mean, the fish on the clean side they put in the tanks that had the Elizabeth River silt … they killed them completely, 100 percent killed them and had no effect on them from that location. And I said, “Wow. That’s wonderful’.” He has been studying them ever since, for about three decades. “It’s one of the best examples of pollution driving evolution,” he said. Di Giulio said the fact that they spend their entire lives in one area and have the ability to withstand pollution without dying is valuable to a toxicologist. “It’s kind of like the canary fish in the coal mine. If you catch [a mummichog] somewhere and you see something like cancer or whatever, some effect on it, you can be pretty sure it’s because of what happened at that point.” Even though she is now president of Wilfrid Laurier University, Deborah MacLatchy still studies mumichogs in the lab. She began her work with them at UNB in ​​Saint John in the 1990s, studying the effects of pulp mill wastewater. (©fresh/Wilfrid Laurier) That’s why Deborah MacLatchy has been studying them since the mid-1990s, when she was at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. “They were living in environments, some of which were very clean and pristine and others that had exposure from various effluents, whether it was from the pulp mill or sewage treatment plants, from the oil refinery and other areas,” MacLatchy said in an interview. . from Wilfrid Laurier University, where he is now president of the school. MacLatchy’s research on mummychogs exposed to pulp mill effluent showed how the chemicals affected fish reproduction and led to changes in the industry. He still does research with them at the Wilfrid Laurier Laboratory and believes the fish will provide scientists with information about climate change in the coming years. “Although they are durable, they have limitations, for example, in the temperatures they will survive,” he said. A young mummichog is shown in the lab at Wilfrid Laurier University. (Liz Brown/Wilfrid Laurier) “And as we think about … climate change and other impacts for the mummichog and all the other species, we need to understand how that interaction between … habitat change, environmental temperature change, etc., will play out for those species.” MacLatchy is glad there’s interest in mummichogs “because they are, especially in New Brunswick … a really, really, really important fish. And they’re … really good [across] North America, this really great, world-renowned research fish.” “I guess they like to hide their light under a bushel a bit.”