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Researchers in Quebec in September captured a live goby between Saint-Ours and Chambly dams, the major barriers between the established goby population in the St. Lawrence River and the northern portion of Lake Champlain\u00a0\u2014 the southernmost capture of a goby in the Richelieu.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew eventually it was going to move upstream, but it is going quicker than we expected,\u201d Goldsmit said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Scientists monitoring round goby use various methods of capturing them, as well as collecting environmental DNA (eDNA) samples from the water. The DNA sampling, which essentially searches for molecular patterns in a vial of water that matches the DNA of a specific species, provides researchers a secondary signal of the goby invasion\u00a0\u2014 but one that is hard to draw definitive conclusions from. Researchers in Quebec also detected DNA evidence of round goby near the U.S.-Canada border, past all barriers on the Richelieu and essentially in the northern part of the lake.<\/p>\n
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Goldsmit said this summer, researchers for the Quebec environmental agency will focus on increasing work to capture live fish as a definitive marker of their invasion status.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think at this moment, more eDNA will not answer things, it will just give more questions,\u201d Goldsmit said. \u201cWe will focus on trying to increase the fishing efforts.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
What\u2019s next for researchers<\/p>\n
To pass the Saint-Ours dam,\u00a0goby could have traveled through a series of locks or used a fish passage in place for native species. To pass through the Chambly canal, goby would have to navigate another series of eight locks. Goldsmit said it\u2019s not clear how easily the species could do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Researchers at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Chicoutimi are conducting a study focused on fish passage in the Richelieu River. The study aims to better understand how native fish like yellow perch, northern pike, brown bullhead and others use the canal system for passage. The Chambly canal system itself is managed by Parks Canada, a federal agency.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt needs to be studied before we will prevent fish passage,\u201d Goldsmit said. \u201cWould that affect that natural connectivity for nature fish?\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as lake managers in New York caution residents from inadvertently transporting invasive species, so do environmental authorities in New York. Unlike in New York, though, the use of live bait fish, a potential pathway for introducing invasives to a new waterbody, is strictly prohibited in Quebec.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spotless goby found in St. Lawrence River<\/p>\n
The Quebec scientists may have also identified a unique type of\u00a0goby, ones without a dark spot often used to identify the species.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Spotless gobies in 2023 and 2024 were caught in the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers, according to a 2025 study authored by Goldsmit and colleagues, accounting for 1% or less of the captured\u00a0gobies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
DNA analysis confirmed they were round goby, but perhaps a phenotype variant that didn\u2019t have the dark spot on its first dorsal fin. The black spot is considered one of the most distinctive features used to distinguish round goby from other goby species or similar-looking natives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe existence of spotless round gobies may challenge public awareness and monitoring efforts,\u201d the study concluded. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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This story originally appeared in the Adirondack Explorer<\/a>, a nonprofit news organization covering people and policy inside the forest preserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The small, bottom-dwelling round goby fish feed on the eggs of other fish species. Courtesy state Department of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,13478,79],"class_list":["post-621516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-latestnews","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}