Cape Breton University students honoured for research on Sydney Tar Ponds, bees

Two Cape Breton University students are being celebrated for different kinds of scientific research.

It has been nearly 20 years since the days of the Sydney Tar Ponds in Cape Breton, but Juanita McKenzie still remembers the impact the toxic site had on her family.

“The sickness and that that was going on,” the Sydney-area resident said. “The leeching of the chemicals that were bubbling over on the ground, the smell.”

McKenzie and other residents fought to be moved away from the toxic sludge in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Though the area has long since been remediated, she still has concerns about its safety.

“Everything’s pretty when you doll it up,” McKenzie said. “But it’s what’s underneath the package, you don’t know what’s there.”

“Growing up in school, we learned so much about it”, said Cape Breton University (CBU) biology research student Hannah MacKinnon. “Everyone around here knows what the Tar Ponds is.”

MacKinnon is too young to remember the infamous waste site, but recently the fourth-year student compared data from a species of fish collected in the area in 2007 – when the Tar Ponds were still there – to the health of the same type of fish now.

“Now there is no significant difference in the pectoral or pelvic fin ray symmetry,” MacKinnon said. “Back in the day, the Tar Ponds fish were more asymmetrical in terms of their fin ray count. It means that they’re eating more. They’re in healthier condition.”

At the former Tar Ponds site, which since 2012 has been rebranded as Open Hearth Park, the toxic waste is still buried underground.

“Basically they just mixed the contaminants with cement and then filled it over,” MacKinnon said of the remediation process that took place between 2008 and 2012.

However, that doesn’t stop people from using the park regularly and it didn’t bother MacKinnon when she was doing her research there.

“I felt safe there conducting the sampling this summer,” she said.

Lara Dalton, who spent last summer at Beinn Bhreagh studying bees in the former garden of Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel Bell, is also being celebrated by CBU for her research

“I used a modernized version of the telephone to take all of my recordings, so it’s kind of like playing on what he did so long ago,” Dalton said, referring to Bell’s invention of the telephone. “Obviously bees are very important for agriculture and pollination with fruits and vegetables there, so it’s kind of bringing both interests of the Bell family into the modern time.”

Both students placed in the top three in their categories at the 2026 Science Atlantic Environment Conference held earlier in March at Acadia University.

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