The Great Lakes Fisheries Specimen Bank: A Canadian perspective in environmental specimen banking

Abstract

Since 1977 the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has maintained a specimen bank for retrospective chemical analyses. The Great Lakes Fisheries Specimen Bank (GLFSB) is a complementary activity to the department's ongoing Great Lakes Contaminants Surveillance Program that has annually, since 1977, monitored levels of metals and organochlorines in aquatic biota throughout the Canadian Great Lakes. Past activities have focused on defining the effects of long-term frozen storage on the integrity of organochlorine residues in archived biological tissues. Archived samples have been reanalyzed for total PCBs, PCB congeners including co-planar PCBs, dioxin and furan isomers, and 22 toxaphene congeners. More recently, archived samples of predatory fish have been analyzed for stable isotopes of nitrogen ( δ 15N) and carbon ( δ 13C), as indicators of historical changes in food web dynamics. A catalogue or user-guide has recently been completed describing all information associated with samples stored in the GLFSB.