Project
Elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying skipped spawning in lake trout
Skipped spawning is a common phenomenon that occurs in long-lived, cold-acclimated deep-water fish, and is thought to be an adaptation to energy resource limitation, density-dependence, or suboptimal environmental conditions. A fish that skips a spawn in a season will be able to accumulate energy reserves for future reproductive success. Skipped spawning is often overlooked in management of cold-acclimated deep-water fish, most likely because the mechanism and drivers are not well understood. Often in field surveys, fish are misclassified as immature when gonads appear under-devel-oped but there is also a good chance that these immature fish are just not spawning that season. Identifying the molecular mechanisms driving skipped spawning is critical as it can identify useful biomarkers that may indicate skipped spawning in advance of spawning season and can allow for predictions of population impacts under a variety of scenarios such as climate change, parasitism, or food web disruption and will improve assessment of recruitment potential of lake trout stocks. Our work proposed here is to determine the molecular mechanisms underlying skipped spawning using archived samples from a common garden experiment that lamprey parasitized lean and siscowet morphotypes and held them for a year after wounding.