"Rather than needing gear that is very specific to one particular fish species or another" explains Dr. Docker, "A single water sample can now be used to test for any possible number of fish species that are present in it."

Dr. Docker says they no longer have to catch fish for the research.

"Whether it's mucus, feces, sloughed off cells, they shed their DNA into the water and then with our assays you can collect that water filter it and then use species specific probes" say Dr. Docker.

Project co-lead, Dr. Daniel Heath of GLIER, says this will be an encyclopedia of information on fresh fish.

"What we decided early on, we wanted to be able to do everything" says Dr. Heath. "Because the fish don't exist in isolation, they're interacting with all the other species. So just saying I'm only interested in the Walleye, well maybe the Perch are going to impact the Walleye trajectory."

The study involves 23 primary investigators at the 13 institutions as well as 36 grad students and 7 post doctoral students.