Eric B. (Rick) Taylor, Professor UBC Zoology and Curator of Fishes, Beaty Biodiversity Museum

The conservative government of Stephen Harper introduced several profound changes to Canada’s environmental legislation in its budget bill (C-38) of June 2012. Amongst these were changes to the federal Fisheries Act (FA), Canada’s longest serving and much envied¹ piece of environmental legislation. Here, I will outline the history of the Fisheries Act, how it has been changed by the passage of Bill C-38, and what it means for Canada’s freshwater fish biodiversity. I focus on freshwater fishes because the key change to the FA involves habitat protection, and habitat loss and degradation are much more series threats to freshwater fishes than for marine fishes^2,3. In addition, while there is often much focus on the diversity of marine fishes which is, undoubtedly, spectacular, consider that almost 40% of all fishes (some 33,000 species and counting) occur in freshwaters yet freshwater habitats make only 0.8% of the total surface area of the Earth! Per unit area, diversity of freshwater fishes is unmatched.

February 12-23, 2014
Join us in celebrating the theories, the people who introduced the world to these concepts, and the evidence of evolution through the fossil record. Museum tours, activities, and crafts will have an evolutionary focus, including creating your own fossils, DNA extraction demos, and touring our neighbour, the Pacific Museum of Earth.

Wayne Maddison (professor of Zoology/Botany and former BBM director) is conducting field work in Jalisco, Mexico (west central part of the country) collecting and observing all sorts of wild and wonderful insects and spiders. Click through for the link to his daily (almost) blog online!

The Cowan Tetrapod Collection Staff are thrilled to announce the repatriation of the type specimen of Spinus psaltria witti, a subspecies of Lesser Goldfinch collected on Maria Magdelena, Tres Marias Islands, Mexico. Dr. Peter Larkin, a former Dean of Graduate Studies at UBC, collected this specimen on March 1st 1961. Dr. Peter Grant, who is best known for his work on Galapagos Finches, described this subspecies when he was a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia.