On the morning of Thursday 16 of October, Curator Vertebrates Alan Tennyson came in and asked Curator Fishes Andrew Stewart if he knew anything about the fish lying out in the carpark up at the Tory Street building. Worried that it might be a collection item, they went out and had a look, and there, lying on the ground, slightly dehydrated and worse for wear, was a small (9 cm) silver fish. Here, Andrew details the investigation into the mysterious fish out of water.
I initially thought it might be a trout or a relative, but it lacked the parr markings (dark vertical stripes or spots) that family has.
The back section was much worse than the front, so any critical feature to aid identification was missing. It did have a VERY large eye, short snout, tiny scales, and a very distinct lateral line. The closest I could get on my first sweep was a mooneye, which is a cold freshwater species from America and Canada. The concern was, if this was right, that 1) someone with an (illegal) aquarium of these could potentially release them into our waterways, where they would feel right at home; and 2) any diseases and parasites that they were host to would also feel right at home. As a precaution, I also contacted MPI and reported it as a possible incursion. Concerned that it could be a species that wasn’t supposed to be here, I put it into a jar of 100% ethanol, and Researcher Lara Shepherd took a tissue sample to run the DNA.
The wee lost fish in the jar was left on the bench at reception, where it spawned a host of really, REALLY bad dad jokes: “An Omen”, “Say something nice about me (Fishing for compliments)”, “Fishing for News”, “Something fishy here” [my personal worst]. Honestly, and these were the ‘best’, the lack of effort was just tragic.
Our Facilities Operations Coordinator, Avon Tautuhi, also went out and marked the spot with a spray can, C.S.I. style, with a fish outline. Unfortunately, Banksy she ain’t, and the result was not … scientific.
Security then got involved, as the cleaners said they’d seen it the day before, and checked CCTV to try to track down how and when it arrived. Running through footage didn’t illuminate the mystery any, though. However, they did catch a still of Avon in the act of tagging and created a caption competition, which is also still running…
And the answer is…
Anyway, the morning of the 29th, Lara got the sequence back, ran it through the gene library in GenBank, and the result is – drum roll please – a Chinook Salmon, a.k.a. King Salmon or Quinnat Salmon, the Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, hailing from the north-west coastal Americas.
This game fish was liberated here back in the 1870s, where it has successfully established itself in the larger cold rivers and lakes of Te Waipounamu South Island. The waters around Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington are about their northern limit as a straggler, as they do not do well in warm water, nor, it seems, a car park.
However, none of this answers the basic question, how the hell did it end up in our car park in the first place? No self-respecting dump chicken gull is going to let a tasty morsel like that get away from it, especially when it was right out in the open for so long. Likewise, the local rats! I guess some mysteries are destined to remain just that.
I am waiting now for ‘The Salmon of Doubt” to be put forward – make it stop, make it stop, make it stop….
Perhaps it jumped a little too high.
Perhaps the mother duck in the Bush City fancied it for her ducklings.
Perhaps it’s a stray from a salmon farm in the Marlborough Sounds.
You can’t interrogate it as it’s dead.