Places
As climate change continues to heat Canada’s waterways, researchers at the Maurice Lamontagne Institute are working to safeguard marine health
A difference of 2.5 degrees Celsius may not sound like much, but it can be catastrophic for a deep-water-dwelling organism.
Many marine species have adapted over millions of years to the deep-sea environment in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But as warmer water moves into the bottom of the Gulf, the cold water they thrive in is being pushed out.
The devastating effect of warming waters is just one of the stark realities tackled by researchers and scientists at the Maurice Lamontagne Institute. Closer to the surface, ship strikes are killing larger marine mammals like the North Atlantic right whale, and invasive species like zebra mussels are pushing out native mussel populations.
Located along the shores of Quebec’s St. Lawrence Estuary in Mont-Joli, Que., the Maurice Lamontagne Institute is a major francophone marine science centre employing more than 550 staff working in two sectors: ocean science and marine conservation management. One of a network of 17 Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) research centres, institutes and labs found in seven regions, the Institute acts as a massive research centre and lab — 70 labs, as well as areas devoted to hydrography, mapping and remote sensing work, are spread throughout the 25,000-square-metre building. Along with researching marine mammals and ocean ecosystem dynamics, staff also monitor aquatic invasive species and fish stock, forecast and observe water levels and develop technological solutions for navigation.
“It’s geographically isolated here, so there is a lot of work going on to understand the ecology of certain species,” says Michael Scarratt, the Institute’s director of pelagic science. Scarratt has been at the Institute for about 25 years and says the rate the ocean is warming has come as a surprise.
“I can remember a statistic being quoted by one of my professors saying the ocean never gets above 28 degrees Celsius. Well, I’m sorry, it does now, and it’s causing big changes,” says Scarratt. “Certainly, when I started here, I don’t think we would have imagined that sort of magnitude of change was likely to happen in just a few decades.”
He says that just 100 years ago, the water temperature off the bottom of the Institute in the Gulf was recorded at four degrees Celsius. It’s now about seven or eight. That’s a massive change for creatures accustomed to living at very low temperatures.
With that in mind, the Institute’s multidisciplinary teams strive to provide the federal government with the data it needs to implement conservation, environmental protection and sustainable management policies, as well as safe navigation rules. Their mandate includes providing the government with a basic snapshot of how the local environment is changing.
The Institute also does public outreach. On the fifth floor, visitors are greeted by fish tanks filled with local species and life-size models of marine mammals and their skeletons. Guided 60-minute tours are available during the summer months, including visits to some of the laboratories, the Canadian Coast Guard vessel maintenance shop, and the tank room used for large-scale experimental studies.
In the tank room, interpreter-guide Jérôme Breton points out a tank housing dozens of deep-water redfish. The Institute is one of the first centres in the world to have successfully brought this species to the surface using a carefully crafted cage (they usually live at depths between 100 and 700 metres). Researchers are studying the redfish’s reproductive cycle and diet.
Each of the more than 40 tanks in the room contains salt water collected directly from the St. Lawrence and can be individually modified for experimental studies on processes like species reproduction, physiology and behaviour. Whelks, starfish, Atlantic wolffish, lobsters, crabs, and multiple fish species are just a few of the marine organisms being studied in simulated environmental conditions. Researchers also spend much of their time in the field, collecting data in the Gulf, the Saguenay Fjord, Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait.
One of the Institute’s main projects is the Marine Mammal Observation Program, which involves the surveillance and research of marine mammals such as the right whale, blue whale, beluga, and fin whale. Using acoustic technology, researchers find the whales using aerial and at-sea surveillance and then plot them on a map. “We want to know where the animals are and make sure the conflicts with human activities are minimal,” says Scarratt. “There’s a lot of work going on in understanding why the whales are here, what they are eating, their migration routes, how they interact with other species and so on..”
After more than two decades in the region, Scarratt says his biggest concern moving forward is climate change and its big changes to the natural environment.
He warns that although incremental changes to water temperatures and ship traffic may sound small, “if you’re talking about an environment that has been stable for thousands and millions of years and you change that even a few degrees, the organisms that are adapted to living there are going to experience changes that they’ve never seen before.” In other words, the sea life in the Gulf is facing quick change — change it’s not necessarily adapted to cope with.
At the Institute, every little thing they can do to better understand this ecosystem helps to give its animal and plant residents a better chance to survive and, hopefully, thrive.
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