It’s First-Year Bio Lab Again, But You’re The Fish

(‘Six Shades of Fish’, by Incé Husain)

The UNB biology department is home to hundreds of zebrafish, guppies, and river trout bred and raised in decorative fish tanks, as well as dead starfish, urchins, jellyfish, squids, sharks, and minks floating in paint drums full of preservative formaldehyde formula. 

Meriet Gray Miller, an animal care assistant at UNB who maintains the lab animals, describes the inch-long zebrafish as having “stripes like zebras” or being “see-through”, and the fur-less, skin-less minks as “terrifying” pieces of “internal musculature”. 

The creatures are dissected for zoology courses or used in experiments to investigate environment-species interactions, like studying the effect of water temperature on fish physiology. 

Miller explains that experimentation scope, pre-dissection euthanasia, and anesthesia regulations for the animals are based on their nervous system complexity. Earthworms, for example, are placed in ethanol unanesthetized due to their underdeveloped systems for pain perception, while stress-sensitive animals, like vertebrates, are handled more strictly, with limitations on experiment invasiveness. An invasive experiment might involve placing surgical implants in a live animal, whereas subjecting an animal to small environmental changes is considered less invasive.

“Anything that can reasonably feel pain and perceive, has a sense of fear, (will) have stricter regulations,” says Miller. “Nervous system complexity, how much (the animal) can feel pain, its sensory organs, is it incredibly aware of its environment, how much (the experiment) will affect the animal’s quality of life (determine) how much anesthetic needs to be used and how much care.” 

Experimentation and dissection events are synchronized with the animals’ natural life cycles and the capacity of the biology labs to ethically sustain them. Miller explains that live animals are mostly used for experiments, and those euthanized in tandem to biology lab dissection curricula are naturally near the end of their lifetime or have grown too large for the lab to comfortably support. Additionally, many river trout succumb to natural deaths. 

The animals procured from outside the lab are raised explicitly as lab animals, collected from the wild, or are excess from animal industries. They originate from preservation companies, fishing industry bycatch, mink farms, and marine biology student fieldwork. Miller considers lab animals to have higher quality lives than those raised in factories. 

“I imagine that the animals (raised) for experimentation are probably raised in better conditions than animals raised for meat on an industrial scale,” says Miller. “(Our UNB lab animals) don't spend their life suffering, they’re not socially deprived, and they don’t die a painful death. They are raised to a scientific standard to raise a high quality fish. They’re not raised to a nutrition quality to raise a fatty, delicious fish.”

Miller shares that working with biology lab animals has not significantly changed his sensitivity to animal life because of their relatively high calibre of treatment amidst their use for research, and that recently proposed alternatives to lab dissections, like interactive computer-simulated dissections, are too idealized to give a legitimate insight into the nuances of animal anatomy. 

“I think (virtual dissections) are smart and futuristic but… it’s too idealized,” says Miller. “Every creature is different. There are general traits you can keep track of, but…not all preserved creatures are the same, it can depend on the genetics, how prominent the features are. Doing a virtual dissection where you get a perfect creature is good for a textbook idea, but I don’t think you’ll get as in-depth an experience with our current technology as compared to hands-on… I can only really understand everything when I have it in my hands.” ♦

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