Purchase - Integrative Fish Biology Lab

NEWS FROM THE LAB

Sept 2026

• New students

  • Welcome to new PhD student Laura Knapwerth, who is spending the semester in St. John's. Laura works predominantly out of St.Fx University in Nova Scotia.

  • Welcome to new undergraduate students who are assisting in research projects: Sophia Yeroshenko, Ashton Goodyear, Marcello Morais, Nico Gill.

• Manuscripts

  • Paper "Investigating biotic, chemical, and physical drivers of periphyton and invertebrate biomass in boreal streams supporting juvenile Altantic salmon" has been submitted for review. Lead authors is PhD student Mikael Ranta.

  • Paper "Assessing fork length, lipid concentration, and sex and predictors of upstream ascent distance and overwinter survival in adult anadromous Atlantic salmon" has been submitted for review. Lead author is MSc student Ava Hart.

late August 2026 - it's been a busy summer

• Field work

  • Niels, Ky and Craig are in the field again the last week of August for juvenile salmon electrofishing on Peter's River 

  • We radio tagged 83 adult salmon in the Exploit's watershed in early July and are tracking their movements upstream of Beothuk Lake. Aerial surveys will begin this fall, and they will be monitored until fall 2027.

  • We acoustic tagged 30 adult salmon and 23 brook trout in Western Brook (Gros Morne Park) in late June and stationary receivers will track their movements for the next year

  • We PIT tagged 400 salmon smolt near Badger on the Exploits watershed in late May

• Manuscripts

  • Paper "A framework for integrating natural and sexual selection within- and across-generations of eukaryotic biphasic life cycles" has been accepted by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology

  • Paper "Predicting substrate size at a watershed scale to inform conservation planning for a declining salmonid species" has been submitted for publication

  • Paper "A chromosome-scale reference genome reveals the genetic architecture of sex in a North Atlantic Sebastes species, S. fasciatus" has been submitted for publication

• Student accomplishments

  • Congrats to Madison Philipp and Connor Hanley who both have passed their MSc thesis examinations

  • Welcome to Laura Knapwerth who joins the lab as a new PhD student. She is co-supervised by Jen Perry at St. Francis Xavier University and will be working primarily out of there on sexual selection in aquatic insects.

  • Both of last year's BSc Hons students got jobs this summer with DFO. Tess Billard in St. John's (working on capelin) and James Day in Moncton (working on striped bass).

April 2026

• Congratulations to Tess Billard and James Day who completed their B.Sc.(Hons) theses.

• Congratulations to Nick Murphy on winning a NSERC USRA for the second year in a row.

• Craig received new funding from The Foundation for Conservation of Atlantic Salmon, for a new tracking project in Western Brook - Gros Morne National Park.

March 2026

• Team Fish have been busy.

• Craig attended the Nova Scotia Salmon Symposium.

• Tyler presented at the project wrap up for the Canada Nature Fund for Aquatic Species at Risk project in western Newfoundland.

June 2025

• Team Salmon and Team Redfish are in the field this month

• Craig is being joined by colleagues from Sweden, the USA, and Parks Canada for an acoustic telemetry project on anadromous brook trout and Atlantic salmon in Western Brook, Gros Morne National Park of Canada.
  
  

May 2025

•  Paper led by former MSc student, Ranjan Wagle, as been accepted for publication by the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society

• Team Salmon has started 9 weeks of intense field work on the Exploits River. We are capturing smolts from 4 locations, electrofishing 12 tributaries, conducting invertebrate surveys, determining diet of salmon parr, conducting gravel surveys, and radio tagging 185 adult salmon.

• Team Redfish conducting a week of gillneting in the Bonne Bay fjord for our genetics project on this unique population.

• Congratulations to Emily Simms and Kaitlyn Rowsell from Team Trout, on completing their B.Sc.(Hons) theses

• Congratulations to Nick Murphy and Chizurum Azu-Emuchay on winning NSERC Undergraduate Research Awards. They will be working with Team Salmon for the summer.

December 2024

• Ky Schlosberg joined Team Trout as a new M.Sc. student. He led the tagging of 255 spawning brown trout this fall, and we installed a PIT tag array in spawning streams to track their movements.

• Team Salmon used a helicopter to track movements of 90 adult salmon that were radio tagged in the summer.