DeVries: the Art of not freezing fish.

Lloyd Peck discusses the impact of two classic Science papers, the first by Art DeVries and Donald Wohlshlag, published in 1969 and the second by DeVries alone published in 1971 on freeze tolerance in Antarctic fish. Art DeVries transformed our understanding of low-temperature biology with two publications in 1969 and 1971. The first paper was with Donald Wohlshlag, an icon of low-temperature biology of that era. They showed that the freezing point of Antarctic fishes and their blood was depressed well below what it was expected to be based on their salt contents (DeVries and Wohlshlag, 1969). In the second paper (DeVries, 1971), Art demonstrated that the mechanism for achieving this was through the production of glycoprotein antifreezes. In the early 1960s, marine biology was changing because of the spread of scuba diving, which was also catching on in Antarctica, and it was there, as a Research Assistant in 1962, that DeVries carried out the first winter study of fish biology. He then began a long series of summer visits to McMurdo Station where he turned out to be the right man in the right place at the right time. Although depth ranges of fish had been identified and related to characteristics such as metabolic rate, he made some of the first underwater observations of Antarctic fish living in intimate contact with ice, and demonstrated that three species in particular, Trematomus borchgrevinki (now Pagothenia borchgrevinki), T. bernacchii and T. hansoni, even use crevices and holes in ice formations as refuges from seal predators. In contrast, some of the deeper water fish such as liparids and zoarcids froze when brought to the surface and came into contact with ice crystals. Earlier studies had shown that some Arctic fish, like the liparids and zoarcids were supercooled and lived only in deep waters where there could be no contact with ice crystals to initiate freezing (Scholander et al., 1957). Research into freezing resistance at this time was, however, dominated by a search for dissolved small solutes, then the only recognised physical mechanism that would lower the freezing point to avoid freezing. In his first iconic paper, DeVries used a Fisk osmometer to measure blood serum freezing points and showed they were around –2.0°C, which is slightly below the freezing point of seawater (–1.9°C) and well over 1°C below the freezing point of blood serum from non-polar fish (DeVries and Wohlshlag, 1969). This paper …