Fish Study Nets Benefits for Scientists

They’re very strange fish, with giant eyes and special ways of smelling, tasting and sensing movement in the perpetual darkness at the bottom of the world’s deepest and oldest freshwater lake.

But for Gerald Ray Smith and his colleague Irv Kornfield, the fish, called sculpins, are fascinating creatures that may yield important clues about the process of evolution and are the unlikely symbols of the benefits of scientific exchanges with the Soviets.

Smith, a professor in the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, and Kornfield, an associate professor of zoology at the University of Maine, stayed in the Soviet Union for a month in 1984.

The pair spent most of their time at the Limnological Institute on Lake Baikal, a Siberian lake more than 360 miles long, more than a mile deep and the crown jewel of the Soviet Union’s natural resources.

Complete Access to Facilities

Smith said he and Kornfield were treated very hospitably, were given complete access to facilities at the large research station and were allowed to work in the labs at night after the Russian scientists had gone home.

The pair were taken out on research vessels to collect study specimens and with their Russian hosts, netted 23 of the 30 species of sculpins found only in Lake Baikal. The fish are able to live deeper than any other lake fish and show bizarre and informative adaptations to the deep, cold waters. Kornfield said the fish live at such great depths that it took two hours just to lower and raise the nets for a 20-minute tow.

Lake Baikal is a “rift” lake, created by the shifting of continental plates, and Smith said Soviet scientists were among the first to describe the geological processes that lead to rift lakes.