Points North: Frankenfish

GORDON: All the raceways with white buckets have fish in them right now.

SHEA: We can see young fish—just a couple inches long—darting around in the water.

GORDON: I’ll have to try to sneak up on them and we’ll net some.

SHEA: He walks slowly towards the pool, and in a flash he scoops a netful of juvenile lake trout.

SHEA: Wow, first try!

GORDON: Yeah, look at that. Done it a couple times.

SHEA: He pulls one out to show me as it flops around in his palm.

GORDON: There’s about 40,000 in each one of these raceways.

SHEA: Last year, this hatchery alone raised 2.2 million lake trout. It’s just one part of a massive stocking operation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

GORDON: The federal government spends tens of millions of dollars every year in direct lake trout restoration … and Lake Michigan, of the upper three lakes, relies on stocking the most.

SHEA: Roger says without stocking, there probably wouldn’t be any lake trout in Lake Michigan. For more than 50 years, the lake’s top native predator has been on life support.

CHUCK MADENJIAN: By 1960, they were gone. You can essentially say there were zero lake trout in Lake Michigan.

SHEA: That’s Chuck Madenjian, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He says first, lake trout were overfished. Then, they really collapsed under the pressure of invasive species. Those invasive species caught a ride to the Great Lakes in shipping vessels. Humans got the lake trout into all this trouble, and now we’re spending a lot of time and money trying to fix it.

MADENJIAN: Stocking has been critical to try to bring them back.

SHEA: But even after all these years of stocking, there aren’t many signs of lake trout reproducing on their own, in the wild. Chuck knows this first-hand. He does surveys twice a year to study populations in Lake Michigan. He’s noticed that a certain strain of lake trout is doing a lot better in the wild. Strain, meaning same species, different original location and slightly different genetics. This one’s called the Seneca strain. And they started stocking it in Lake Michigan in the 80s.

MADENJIAN: Seneca Lake is a lake in upstate New York that has a native Lake Trout population in it. That strain, somehow, has the quality of being able to better evade lamprey attacks, for whatever reason.

SHEA: After a breakthrough last summer, we’re a lot closer to knowing that reason.

That’s because a PhD student at Michigan State University assembled the first-ever reference genome for Lake Trout. That’s like a map of a species’ genetic make up. And it can help scientists find out which specific genes are responsible for specific characteristics. The student who assembled the genome was Seth Smith. And to be clear, he didn’t do it with genetic engineering in mind. He just wanted a deeper understanding of this species. Seth spins a pretty good metaphor for how hard it is to map a genome.

Lake trout reference genome.

SETH SMITH: You know within every cell in an organism, you have a copy of a genome. And you can think of each copy of that genome as a full set of encyclopedias. And then assembling a genome is kind of like shredding all those copies of the encyclopedia and trying to piece back together one of the single copies from all of this nonsense you get.

SHEA: Mapping a whole genome used to be pretty much impossible for most geneticists. If not physically, then financially. But that has totally changed. In just the past ten years, the price of sequencing a whole genome went from tens of millions of dollars to just a few hundred dollars.

Seth’s research could tell us why the Seneca strain does so much better than others. In fact, he might’ve figured it out already. Or at the very least, he’s provided some great clues. He looked at trout that were part Seneca, part something else. And tried to find which Seneca genes might be favorable.

SMITH: So basically what we did is looked for regions of the genome that had an excess of chromosome blocks from the Seneca strain. And what was really interesting is the genes within these regions were enriched for genes associated with the regulation of vascular wound healing and swimming behavior. So kind of our hypothesis is that maybe the Seneca strain is doing better because they have an increased ability to either avoid or survive lamprey predation.

SHEA: If you listened to the last episode of this series, you already know that a sea lamprey is basically a blood-sucking monster fish. It’s one of those invasives that hitched a ride on shipping vessels into the Great Lakes.

SPRINGER: Ok this is starting to make a lot of sense, because sea lampreys cause wounds, right?

SHEA: Yeah, because they’ve got a bunch of sharp teeth. I had a friend in college who called lampreys “ouch noodles,” which I love.

WANSCHURA: That’s awesome.

Sea lamprey kill native fish like lake trout by latching onto them and drinking their blood.

SPRINGER: So if they can heal from those wounds, that’s a plus, right?

SHEA: Yeah, and swimming skills—maybe those could help them avoid lampreys in the first place. So, if those specific genes are the reason for the Seneca strain’s success, I want to know how that information might be used in hatcheries.

Because their goal is to get lake trout to a place where they don’t need our help anymore. Here’s Roger Gordon again.

GORDON: Our goal is to put ourselves out of business. We want to establish self-sustaining populations of fish. And then once that’s done, we back off and we do something else. We have a lot of problems. We have a whole list of animals that we can work on. Well once this animal is done—it’s restored—we’ll move on to the next one.

SHEA: People like Roger have spent entire careers stocking lake trout. In Lake Superior, the population is fully recovered, and Lake Huron is well on its way. But Lake Michigan’s another story. Its population still hasn’t recovered. So what if there’s another way? A faster way? What if there’s a bold, new, controversial way to get lake trout back on their feet—or, fins?

What if we didn’t need to spend so much time and energy on stocking? What if genetic engineering could be used for conservation? What if that’s our ace in the hole for saving species from problems we started? What if we could take genes from the Seneca strain, and insert them into other strains, to maintain genetic diversity and increase survival? What if—

WANSCHURA: Alright, Patrick. I’m gonna reel you in a little bit. That’s a lot of what-ifs.

SHEA: I know, I know. I’m just trying to emphasize that this really is a “what if” story. I don’t want it to sound like scientists are about to let some frankentrout out into the wild. But should they?

WANSCHURA: Hmm. Maybe?

SPRINGER: I hear you, and I gotta just jump in and say my gut reaction is no. I think part of it is because of all the stories we’ve been hearing. We think we’ll just do this little thing, we’ll fix it and it’ll be great. And then it’s actually not great. I just don’t know how we do something that feels so massive, and don’t just continue that pattern of unintended consequences.

WANSCHURA: I mean if humans caused the problem, is there a burden on humans to try to be the solution? If they have the technology, you know?

SHEA: I think you guys are really capturing the split well. There’s this ethical line between what we could do and what we should do. That’s really evident here, with conservation genomics. It’s a hope in the midst of mass extinction for some people. But for others, it’s a dangerous game. Playing god. Messing with the very fabric of the universe. And for me, it’s just very hard to wrap my head around. One thing we have to acknowledge is that some form of genetic manipulation has been going on for a long time. Marty Kardos is a research geneticist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

MARTY KARDOS: In reality, we’ve been tinkering with nature profoundly for thousands of years. I mean we took teosinte and turned it into—I mean look what we’ve done with a lot of crop species.

SPRINGER: What the heck is teosinte?

SHEA: I had to look it up, too. It’s a type of wild grass that eventually became corn, through selective breeding. Teosinte has a two inch ear with only about ten kernels. An ear of modern corn is usually about a foot long, and has around 500 kernels.

WANSCHURA: And always gets stuck in your teeth.

SHEA: Exactly. And think about all the selective breeding we’ve done in animals, too.

WANSCHURA: Yeah, livestock. Like chickens, cows…

SPRINGER: Oh my gosh, dogs.

WANSCHURA: That’s a good one.

SHEA: Dogs is a huge one. What is a wiener dog? How did a wiener come to be? And I’ve heard pugs have breathing problems because we’ve bred their faces so short.

SPRINGER: They do. I’ve seen it.

WANSCHURA: Oh yeah. They snore; they snort.

SHEA: Some form of genetic manipulation has been going on for a long time, that’s the point.

But what we’re talking about today is different. Apparently, since we live in the future, it’s now possible to extract a gene from one plant or animal and insert it into another. Like AquaBounty did with salmon. So, say there’s a desirable trait you want a species to have—like, I don’t know, random example: wound healing or swimming abilities.

WANSCHURA: Right.

SPRINGER: Totally random example.

SHEA: Pulled it out of a hat. It’s really not that crazy to imagine taking genes from the Seneca strain of lake trout and inserting them into other strains. Now, are any geneticists actually looking into that? The short answer is no. Kim Scribner is a professor at Michigan State. Seth, who mapped the trout genome, studied under him.

KIM SCRIBNER: In conservation, I think that people have been somewhat reluctant to embrace gene editing because of the fear that once these edited genes are in the natural environment, it’s like the genie’s out of the bottle. And you really don’t know what the potential effects of that are going to be.

SHEA: Marty Kardos agrees. He wrote an opinion paper a few years back called “the peril of gene-targeted conservation.” Marty says our technology might be outpacing our understanding.

KARDOS: There’s no recipe for exactly how to go about doing this. And the natural world is immensely complex. It’s difficult to predict how ecosystems will respond to something we do.

SHEA: And he says even if we do get really good at this stuff, we won’t be genomick-ing our way out of this anytime soon.

KARDOS: Genomics is sort of an exciting new thing, but it can’t change the fundamental reasons for lots of populations not doing well. And those reasons are environmental factors. Climate change, overexploitation, loss of habitat.

SHEA: Clearly, experts are pretty hesitant about using genetic engineering for conservation. But we don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t know what threats to lake trout lie ahead. And we also don’t know what geneticists might do with the reference genome. That’s public information now.

So then the question is: will someone decide to use it for genetic engineering?

It might sound far-fetched, but right now, there’s even research going into bringing back extinct species.

WANSCHURA: Are you serious? No way.

SHEA: Yeah, this is real, well-funded research. Geneticists at Harvard are trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth by combining its preserved DNA with modern elephant genes. And in Australia, geneticists want to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, which settlers hunted to extinction. They just raised an extra 3.6 million dollars for that project.

Woolly mammoths.

SPRINGER: Wow, that just seems so wild. Kind of crazy to think about. It just makes me think about what Mart Kardos said. We can’t predict—like what’s the resurrected Tasmanian tiger going to do on the planet? What’s the woolly mammoth elephant going to do?

SHEA: The frankenmammoth. It does seem crazy, honestly. But some people want to bring back species just for the intrinsic value of having them around. And they feel it’s the right thing to do, especially if we caused their extinction. So, there is some serious movement right now in conservation genetics. Or genomics. Or genetic engineering. Or whatever.

Personally, I find these advancing technologies amazing and interesting and honestly, promising. And again, I can’t help but wonder– shouldn’t we do everything we’re capable of to right our wrongs? I asked Roger Gordon, at the fish hatchery, that question.

GORDON: That’s a very open-ended question. Fisheries biologists, for the most part, are a very conservative lot. Especially ones as old as I am who have seen some of the problems we’ve had in the past where as human beings we thought we could improve upon mother nature. And most of those things turn out bad.

WANSCHURA: That’s kind of the essence of this whole series, in a way.

SPRINGER: Yeah it reminds me of the weevil. Of us thinking we’ve got this magical solution, and then womp-womp, it totally doesn’t work.

WANSCHURA: That’s episode one for you newbies, by the way.

SHEA: I thought the same thing. About the weevil. And what’s really interesting is a lot of the people I talked with throughout this series kept bringing up the same exact phrase, and it comes from the field of medicine. We heard about it in episode one, and Marty Kardos mentioned it, too.

KARDOS: Medicine and conservation are very similar in ways. Medicine is sort of the conservation of human life. And there’s this idea of the hippocratic oath in medicine.

SHEA: That “hippocratic oath,” put simply, is “first, do no harm.” Marty says just like physicians, conservationists should balance the risks and benefits of any intervention. The last thing a good doctor wants to do is hurt a patient when they’re trying to help, right? And if you apply that medical principle to the environment, that means valuing our ecosystems as highly as our own bodies. And that’s a pretty high bar.

Listen to the entire season of [Un]Natural Selection from Points North:

[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 1: A Necessary Weevil?
[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 2: Houses Built On Sand
[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 3: What To Do With The ‘Big Bad Wolf’
[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 4: ‘Forest Of The Living Dead’
[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 5: Rekindling Wilderness
[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 6: Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don’t
[Un]Natural Selection Ep. 7: Frankenfish

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Featured image: [Un]Natural Selection is a special series from Points North where we examine our role as part of the ecosystem and explore the ethical line between mending our natural world and meddling with it. (logo design by Erin O’Malley)