Steacie Fellowship RTI - Fish Tracking System

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My team in the Fish Ecology and Conservation Physiology Laboratory at Carleton studies the ecology of stress in wild fish. Our long-term goal is to establish a clear understanding of the inter-relationships between the environment, physiology, behaviour and fitness at the individual level as well as scaling up to populations. This body of work will provide a functional understanding of the effect of human-induced rapid environmental change on wild organisms while elucidating the mechanistic relationships between individual physiology and population declines. In late 2014, I was awarded an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship titled "Understanding the consequences of multiple stressors on the migration of Pacific salmon". For that award we will determine how upriver migrating salmon respond to multiple stressors and whether the effects of stressors experienced at one stage of the migration will carry over to subsequent times and locations. Despite the potential importance of carry-over effects, they are rarely studied due to difficulties associated with tracking individuals through space and time. The Steacie Fellowship builds on the ideas developed in my Discovery Grant (DG) but is much more ambitious and challenging in terms of mounting a series of large-scale field experiments that cover entire watersheds yet involve determining whether individual fish spawn. To support the research outlined in my Steacie Fellowship over the next two years and to provide me with the ability to integrate that type of mechanistic field research into my NSERC DG program, I require specialized equipment. The equipment requested is for the tracking of wild fish using electronic tagging technology combining elements of biotelemetry (remote transmission of information) and biologging (information logged for later downloading). Radio telemetry is needed to characterize migration behaviour, identify fate, enable the recovery of fish and locate fish equipped with biologger tags to facilitate tag recovery and downloading. The proposed equipment will facilitate the training of PDFs, graduate students and undergrads while enabling them to conduct creative and cutting edge studies that bridge ecology, behaviour, physiology and conservation.