Understanding and comparing historic and contemporary habitat use and distributions of coregonines (Gap Analysis, Box 2) has been deemed essential to inform all boxes of the Great Lakes coregonine restoration framework; there are dependencies between planning boxes...
Post Archive:
Planning
Morphological and genomic assessment of putative hybridization among deepwater ciscoes and between deepwater ciscoes and typical artedi in Lakes Michigan and Huron
Species diversity can be lost through a combination of demographic decline and hybridization (Mallet 2005; Seehausen 2006). Regarding diversity losses among Ciscoes (subgenus Leucichthys, genus Coregonus) across the Great Lakes, the demographic decline in the 20th...
Identifying and characterizing coregonine spawning habitat in Lake Erie
During the fall of 2021 and 2022, Lake Whitefish egg deposition was assessed using egg mats and egg pumping along the southern shore of the central and eastern basins in Lake Erie. Sampling was conducted at 12 different locations with 111 individual sites sampled over...
Building an adaptive tool for mapping habitat and species to support the Great Lakes coregonine conservation and restoration framework
Coregonines have declined substantially over the past century throughout the Great Lakes. A basin-wide framework, adopted by the Council of Lake Committees, has been developed to conserve and restore these ecologically and economically important native fishes. We are...
Inventorying Great Lakes survey and life history information to facilitate coregonine science, conservation, and restoration
Population models are a critical tool for informing native fish conservation and the types of models that can be developed are determined by data availability. In the Great Lakes, the size of the ecosystems and the multi-organizational management approach means...
Historical habitat use by Coregonus artedi in Lake Michigan
With the global-scale loss of biodiversity, current restoration programs have been often required as part of conservation plans for species richness and ecosystem integrity. The restoration of pelagic-oriented cisco (Coregonus artedi) has been an interest of Lake...
Development of a genetic map for cisco and bloater
We constructed a linkage map for cisco (Coregonus artedi), an economically and culturally important fish in the Great Lakes and across North America, which previously lacked a high-density haploid linkage map. We used diploid and haploid cisco from northern Lake Huron...
Inventory and assessment of coregonine spawning locations in lakes Erie and Ontario, including connecting channels
This project involved two phases. First, to identify locations of key habitats for coregonines in lakes Erie and Ontario and their respective connecting channels, we conducted a literature review of historical spawning, nursery, and adult habitat sites where...
Are cisco and lake whitefish competitors in the Great Lakes? Implications for future reintroduction efforts
The overall objective of this project was to evaluate historical commercial gill net fishery data available for State of Michigan waters of Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron for evidence of potential negative interactions between Cisco Coregonus artedi and Lake...
Dedicated surveys to describe the distribution and abundance of a remnant cisco population in Green Bay
Contemporary spawning of cisco and lake whitefish is not known to occur in southern Green Bay but in recent years a small number (< 10 per year) of cisco adults have been recovered along the Door Peninsula, and lake whitefish larvae have been captured in drift...
Spatio-statistical modeling and field validation of coregonine spawning and nursery locations for the Great Lakes, including connecting channels and major tributaries
This research builds on the spawning habitat inventory work [GLRI: Inventory and assessment of coregonine spawning locations in lakes Erie and Ontario, including connecting channels] by using data gleaned from the previous study to develop descriptive and predictive...
Historical and contemporary genetic diversity of Coregonus species from Lake Michigan
Advancements in molecular biology methods have allowed researchers to analyze genetic variation in extinct or extirpated species where minuscule amounts of cellular material remain. Here for the first time, we have leveraged one of these methods -...
Historical habitat use by Coregonus artedi in the upper Great Lakes and critical embayments
The restoration of the once abundant cisco (Coregonus artedi) is a management interest across the Laurentian Great Lakes. To inform restoration, we describe historical distributions of cisco in the upper Great Lakes (i.e., Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron) by...
Building molecular tools for coregonine species identification
The larval phase of Coregonus spp. represent a bottleneck in year class strength that is not well understood in extant populations and could present an impediment for coregonine restoration efforts in the Great Lakes. The use of species-specific DNA sequences to...
Are there differences in larval and juvenile gene expression between hatchery and wild coregonids?
Management agencies are investigating best practices for coregonid (C. artedi and C. hoyi) culture, stocking, and broodstock development. However, before large scale production can begin, decisions about the sources of broodstock, culture practices, and stocking rates...
Genetic diversity among Great Lakes cisco species: exploring taxonomic and population boundaries
Ciscoes (Coregonus artedi, hoyi, kiyi, zenithicus, and nigripinnis) once formed a diverse species flock in the Great Lakes. While several taxa appear to have been extirpated, those that remain are an important part of the Great Lakes food web. Deepwater forms (C....
How does ecological function correspond to morphology in Great Lakes coregonines?
Human activities have caused widespread biodiversity loss, particularly in freshwater systems. For example, historical fish assemblages of the deepwater habitats of the Laurentian Great Lakes were dominated by up to eight closely related taxa from the genus Coregonus....
Movements and habitat use of cisco along a nearshore-offshore gradient in northern Lake Huron
Historically, the Great Lakes supported large and diverse cisco populations until overfishing, establishment of invasive species, and habitat loss resulted in large-scale extirpation during the mid 19th century. Managers have prioritized recovery of cisco in Lake...
Site fidelity, depth-habitat use, and reproductive behavior of ciscoes in Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan
Successful reintroduction of cisco (Coregonus artedi) to the Great Lakes requires that stocked individuals are suitably adapted to environmental conditions at stocking sites. Thus, understanding how cisco ecology, life history, and behavior varies among extant...
Kiyi reproductive phenology in Lake Superior
Kiyi historically occurred in Lakes Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior. Today they occur in Lake Superior. Reestablishing Kiyi into lakes where it went extinct is a topic of discussion among Laurentian Great Lakes fishery managers. An impediment to re-introducing...
Quantifying a potential mechanism between ice cover and cisco recruitment success: what role does light play in cisco embryonic development and larval survival?
Over the past several decades, Coregonus recruitment has dwindled to unprecedented levels for unknown reasons. Coregonus species are fall spawners whose embryos incubate under ice throughout the winter and hatch in spring. Recent changes in ice cover coupled with poor...
Comparing genetic population structure of Great Lakes cisco and lake whitefish to help determine restoration targets
Species diversity is necessary for the maintenance of sustainable fisheries because differential use of habitats can help buffer against unpredictable conditions. Therefore, an important first step to maintaining or restoring species diversity is describing extant...
Contemporary habitat selection and survival of cisco in Lake Erie
This project addressed impediments to the rehabilitation of Cisco (Coregonus artedi) in Lake Erie through the application of acoustic telemetry to develop novel data on habitat use and survival of experimentally stocked fish. We tagged Cisco at the Tunison Laboratory...
Morphologic, geographic and genetic variation among Lake Superior ciscoes
The Laurentian Great Lakes once contained a diverse endemic cisco complex, but a series of factors resulted in declines in diversity and now Lake Superior is the only Great Lake with a relatively intact cisco complex. Although the large, pelagic cisco, Coregonus...
Redesigning nearshore and offshore fish community protocols to incorporate new species identification approaches and determine optimal sampling strategies
The objective of this work was to begin the process of describing Lake Superior larval ciscoe population dynamics at the species level, something which was not possible prior to 2019 (Ackiss et al. 2020) and use this information to develop standard collection protocols. From 2014-2023, larval fish were sampled at 163 and collected at 159 locations across Lake Superior. Due to COVID restrictions, no sampling occurred in 2020 and sampling in 2021 was limited to USA waters. Across all years, this sampling yielded 90,618 ciscoe larvae of which 11,751 individuals were identified based on genomics. The 4,369 larval ciscoes collected in 2023 have not yet but will be genomically identified. Genomic identifications yielded 78 Bloater, 8,671 Cisco, 75 Lake Whitefish, 1,969 Kiyi, and 958 putative hybrids. Principal findings include the widespread distribution of all species across the lake by July; high annual variation in hatching dates, sequential species hatch dates that match chronological spawning periods; Cisco first, Kiyi second, and Bloater third, and the occurrence of a genetically unique stock of Cisco along the north shore of the lake.
In 2022, unprecedented larval ciscoe survival past July provided an opportunity to collect young age-0 ciscoes in August, September, and October and evaluate their population dynamics. This effort resulted in the collection and genomic identification of 79 Bloater, 456 Cisco, 1,086 Kiyi, and 77 putative hybrids. A principal finding to date was documenting the late-summer movement of these fish from the surface, their preferred habitat in May-July, to 10-15 m below the surface in early August at around 25 mm in total length. This discovery has implications for when and how these fish can be collected.
A third outgrowth of this study was the opportunity to compare morphological-based species identifications to genomic-based species identifications for age-0 and near age-1 fish. This work could lead to a better understanding of which species, and at which size they can be reliably identified aboard the ship based on morphological characteristics. Dual identifications to date include 503 Bloater, 81 Cisco, 75 Kiyi, 3 Shortnose Cisco, 4 Pygmy Whitefish, and 89 putative hybrids, with an additional 2,292 age-1 ciscoes collected in 2023 remaining to be genomically identified. Preliminary analyses show rates of accurate morphological identification as compared to genomics to be highest for Cisco and lowest for Bloater, with the overall identification accuracy exceeding 90% for all three ciscoes when total length exceeds 140 mm.