Meet the biologists recording the natural history of the NWT

Nestled into a verdant landscape in Gatineau, Québec, sits the Canadian Museum of Nature’s research and collections facility, which houses millions of animal and plant specimens.

There, researchers study and catalogue skins, bones, plant matter, fossils and rocks that make up the flora, fauna and geology of the country – and the NWT – collected over the past 250 years or more. Some specimens in the collection go back as far back as the Franklin expedition.

“Our natural history is housed here,” said biologist Troy McMullin. “This is our evidence locker.”

The facility has dozens of secure climate-controlled rooms, normally off limits to the public except during special tours and open houses. Each room is filled with cabinets and shelves where specimens are meticulously catalogued and maintained to ensure their longevity in the collection.

“It’s good to understand where things are in space and time, so that you can acknowledge change. If you don’t have that baseline record, then it’s hard to say what you know – if things have gotten better, if they’ve gotten worse,” said McMullin.

He and other researchers at the museum are working to record Canada’s natural history so that changes to ecosystems can be mapped.

As the effects of climate change are felt faster and more severely in the NWT than in the other parts of the country, the work of cataloguing northern environments feels increasingly vital.

The ‘receding lichen line’

McMullin is a lichenologist at the museum who takes a particular interest in lichens found in the Arctic.

Lichens are the result of a mutually beneficial partnership between fungi and algae that allows the organism to photosynthesize. They are often found on rocks and trees around the NWT, and are an important – albeit not overwhelmingly nutritious – source of food for caribou in the winter, when other food might be scarce.

Lichens are unique because unlike rooting plants, they absorb the nutrients they need from the air and water.

“They’re little sponges, and they’re completely self-contained little ecosystems,” said McMullin. “They’re just absorbing what washes over them, what’s washing by in the air.”

For this reason, McMullin said, lichens are good indicators for air pollution.

He said that in cities like London, lichens all but disappeared during the industrial revolution but as the air got cleaner, lichens could be mapped moving back into the city.

Even so, the lichens you might find in a city still don’t compare to what’s growing in an intact forest with good air quality.

“Those trees are going to be dripping with lichens,” said McMullin – and those organisms are likely affected by the persistent wildfire smoke lingering over the NWT for much of the summer.

He said there hasn’t been enough research into what that impact might be, so we don’t know definitively how lichens are affected by particulate matter in the air.

“But we can say what has happened in other places when air quality was bad,” said McMullin. “They tend to disappear.”

The lichenologist said forests and other areas where lichens are found are constantly changing, and that sometimes lichens that aren’t as sensitive do well in more polluted areas.

The nature museum’s collection includes specimens collected by John Macoun, who was the dominion botanist in the 1800s. McMullin says that for the most part, lichens are no longer found where Macoun recorded them.

“It makes sense they’re not there any more, but sometimes they’re not there for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres that we know of, just because things have changed so much,” said McMullin.

“I call it Macoun’s receding lichen line.”

McMullin said he’s been working for years to have a lichen species endemic to the NWT, the Arctic orangebush, listed as “at risk,” which would grant it federal protection.

“We’re solely responsible for it – it’s only known from 12 sites and 18 collections ever,” McMullin said.

He said the lichen has been collected on the western side of Victoria Island and on the eastern side of Banks Island.

McMullin describes the species as a “showy” lichen due to its bright orange colour and the fact that it grows to be relatively large. He said it is unusual that its distinct appearance hasn’t led to more sightings and collections.

While he has earned the support of the GNWT and a federal department to conduct the field work necessary to have it listed as at risk, cost remains a barrier to completing that research. A helicopter would be needed to survey sites where the Arctic orangebush was previously found and seek out new sites.

McMullin thinks it’s worth the money to have the species listed federally, as climate change is a significant threat to this and other rare species in the NWT.

“The sea ice is melting, which means there’s more wave action. Permafrost is melting so the shores are softer, so you’re getting more erosion,” he said.

“This thing is only known from coastal sites, really. So it’s got a threat to its environment. It’s extremely rare.”

Frozen ‘miracle’ frogs

In the fish and amphibians section of the facility, more than a million specimens sit in jars with royal blue seals.

The seals are meant to help prevent the slow evaporation of ethanol or formalin used to preserve the bodies of small creatures, each one suspended in time.

The collection’s focus is on Canadian animals, all of it organized first by species, then by locality. The intact specimens can be dissected and X-rayed for research purposes.

Collections manager Stephanie Tessier said growing up in a rural area motivated her to start identifying wildlife at a young age. As a child, her dad created a large pond in their backyard that helped to propel her into the field of biology.

“I kind-of had no choice, it was there just waiting for me to study it,” said Tessier of the pond.

Of the collection, Tessier pulls out a wood frog specimen. This is one of the most common amphibians in the NWT, she says, because of an adaptation that allows them to survive long and cold winters.

They spend months being nearly completely frozen before bringing themselves back to life in the spring.

“As soon as an ice crystal touches their skin, the body reacts and starts a process to freeze inside their body, and they start accumulating all of their urine, and it’s kind-of shoved inside their cells,” explained Tessier.

“Their liver excretes a bunch of glucose – so much sugar – that makes a solution inside their cell. That kind-of keeps it as a bubble and everything around it, all the internal liquid, all the tissues freeze solid.”

Then, their lungs slowly stop working and the heart stops beating.

Frogs have been recorded in this state for up to nine months of the year, Tessier said.

Once temperatures warm up in the spring, they “start thawing from the inside out,” explained Tessier. As the high-glucose liquid is released from the frogs and new water starts entering their systems, their lungs start to work again and their hearts resume beating.

“It’s kind-of a miracle. They just start up again,” said Tessier.

“People have been using it for medical research, just to compare and see how they can have 100 times more glucose than they should, technically, for that kind of animal.”

She said these frogs can reproduce faster than any other amphibian, an evolutionary adaptation they picked up because the mating season, which requires warm temperatures, is so short.

Waterborne creatures like these, Tessier said, are vulnerable to prolonged droughts like the one the NWT has been experiencing since 2022.

“Amphibians in that area, they don’t reproduce every year because of the conditions,” said Tessier. While they can go several years without reproducing, it can take a toll on populations.

“The numbers can really go down fast,” Tessier said.

Other amphibians with northern adaptations include the Canadian toad. In in 1989, during the construction of Highway 5 near Fort Smith, some of the toads were found burrowing into the ground to survive the winter.

“[Researchers] saw a hillside where they were doing the highway, and [they saw] a bunch of holes everywhere – like 500 holes – and they started looking,” said Tessier.

“They kept coming to the holes and seeing little toad prints – you have to be very detail-oriented to find those in the bush – and then about 10 centimetres deep, they found a bunch of toads in those holes.”

These became some of the first toads ever recorded in the NWT, Tessier said.

Most of the specimens, Tessier said, were collected and donated to the museum between the 1940s and the 1980s by naturalists and researchers.

“In the ’60s, the collection was [growing by] thousands and thousands every year or so,” said Tessier.

Now, the museum is more judicious about what it accepts, and applies an ethical lens to its approach.

“We don’t want to kill more than we need,” said Tessier. “We’re very conservative in that sense, we don’t want to affect the populations.”