Say what you want about the burbot, the unheralded and undeservedly ranked lowliest of the lowest Northern fishes.

Call him slimy and foul, ugly and beastly; a deep water skulk that tastes food with his feet. But be rest assured next time you wrinkle your nose at this strangest of underwater creatures, this is a fish that does not suffer envy.

"They got just gigantic testicles," says Pete Cott, a fisheries research biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who has been studying burbot, with its many aliases - lawyer, eelpout, cusk, and up here, ling cod and loche - for the last three years for a PhD project with Laurentian University.

This fish might not win any beauty contests but fisheries biologist Pete Cott likes them. "I think burbot look really neat," he said after an evening attempt to fish them out of a netted pen set up on Yellowknife Bay. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo

"That probably has something to do with the fact that there's a lot of sperm competition."

We are standing on the ice of Yellowknife Bay not far from the city, under attack by a swarm of mosquitoes of all things. Underneath us is a holding pen of sorts that Cott had spent weeks filling with burbot in the dark and bitter cold back in December and January.

And now I was here in April to help "fish them out" so that their bodies could be taken back to the lab where Cott will dissect and study them further, including the males' over-sized testes.

We were quite literally fishing in a barrel but other than one fat, grayish-yellow specimen I had hooked shortly after I arrived, and another smaller one captured by Cott's spouse Sarah Elsasser much later, the fishing was tediously slow. There were at least another 30 burbot in the pen - a net frozen to the ice 10 metres across and 10 metres deep - but the only thing that seemed to be biting was the net itself, which had already claimed a half-dozen of my hooks on the bottom.

"They're a full-on predator, and they seem to be really picky as well," says the 38-year-old Yellowknife resident.

"If we leave bait soaking for a while, they won't eat it. The catch will just drop right off. Part of that might have to do with that they have taste buds right on their barbels, and their pelvic fins ... they got taste buds on them too."

There is much we don't understand about this underrated creature, says Cott.

Most fish feed during the day, burbot feed primarily at night, and while most fish pack on the pounds during the summer, count on the cold-loving burbot to stuff their bulbous bellies while feeding deep below the ice.

Not only are they strange to look at with their leopard print skins, frog-like heads and skinny, well-finned tails, the anatomical arrangement is all out of whack too. The aforementioned pelvic fins, which, if we use the fish-evolving-into-man analogy, are way up high near their throats, kind of like having one's feet where the hands ought to be.

Although somewhat in decline due to overfishing and pollution in the southern part of their range, burbot still have the widest distribution among freshwater fish anywhere in the world. Many of the deepest, coldest lakes and broadest rivers across the boreal belt from northern Asia to Europe and North America contain this sole freshwater relative of the Atlantic cod, but its secretive habits, its penchant for the bottom gloom and spawning in winter under ice, have made it a difficult fish to study.

It also doesn't help that a lot of people, particularly anglers targeting other species like lake trout, treat this fish like a desperation date with the ugly girl in pottery class. As a child, I recall all too well the grimaces of disgust people made when describing how the eel-like burbot would coil around one's arm as it was pulled through a hole in the ice after being angled from the deep.

Cott calls it "Ugly Fish Syndrome," and that says a lot about why dream date species such as salmon and trout are studied to death while the lowly burbot rarely earns so much as a footnote.

And that's a shame, because besides being tasty and easy to clean, much like their saltwater cod cousins, burbot really are top dog in the water, says Cott.

"What we've seen so far is that they're higher up in the food web than pike are," he says.

"They're right up there with lake trout, and in some lakes they're even a little bit higher. They're not a bottom-scavenging kind of garbage fish. They're a top-level predator in these lakes, and that's pretty definitive stuff."

While not fast nor particularly strong swimmers, Cott says they're a watery version of the long-distance runner, sometimes swimming hundreds of kilometres to get to their spawning grounds. Their love for the cold also gives them an advantage. When other fish are lying dormant during winter, burbot are gulping down everything that'll fit into their sand paper mouths. It explains why burbot grow under the ice while other fish do not.

And grow they do, although slowly in their Northern realm. The pending all-tackle world record is a 25.2 pound brute caught out of Lake Diefenbaker earlier this year, but there are legends of them far outstripping that in far-off corners in Alaska and Siberia, and perhaps right here in the NWT, up in the Delta or in the Liard River.

Cott's study, which involves burbot both here and in Ontario, has several components: where it sits in the food web (high, he has found); another looks at how burbot make more little burbot.

Biologists have long known that burbot spawn in winter - usually around February or March - when they head into the shallower parts of lakes and gather in large, squirming balls of pulsating flesh. Cott says its unknown how many of them will be males and how many are females - it's impossible to tell them apart at a glance - but the males are probably in heavy competition with each other for a limited number of females, hence the enormous testicles.

Cott says he is interested in knowing what brings them together, and that is why he has built the underwater pen on Yellowknife Bay. Earlier this year he installed a recording device, which Cott deemed the "Lota-tron" in honour of the burbot's latin name, Lota lota, to find out if the burbot "sing" to each other.

Burbot, like their cod ancestors, have muscles that extend around their swim bladders. Cott wants to know if burbot can twitch these muscles like Atlantic cod can to make grunting noises. He suspects this is how they call their mates.

"It's a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment we're renting from a company back east that does recording for oil and gas companies looking for disturbances of whales," says Cott.

"They set it up so it could detect low volume noises across the bottom end of the frequency range, because most fish hear between 50 and 1,600 hertz. So you think if they're going to vocalize to attract mates they're going to do it within the range they can hear."

All very cool stuff, I'll say. Cott says he has another year-and-a-half to go to complete his study and earn his PhD so I look forward to hearing more then. Cheers, long live the burbot!

• Mike W. Bryant is assignment editor for Yellowknifer. Contact him at 766-8236 or by e-mail at minder@nnsl.com