Our Annual Whitefish Meeting was held in Kincardine last week and was a great success.  We spent 2 days in deep discussion of Lake Whitefish stable isotopes, population genetics, heat shock responses, growth and hatching, and stressor impacts.

Our research on whitefish is interdisciplinary and involves a number of collaborators.  From the University of Regina, the labs of Drs. Chris Somers and Richard Manzon study whitefish population genetics and heat shock responses, respectively.  Both have some great new students that have joined our research group this year.  We are very happy to have Katie Sessions join Dan Stefanovic as graduate students on this project in Richard’s lab.  Carly Graham joins Becca Eberts in Chris Somer’s lab this year as well.  Chris’ lab is collaborating with Sean Rogers at the University of Calgary; Jon Mee is a postdoc working in Sean’s lab on Whitefish genomics.  Of course, in the Wilson and Boreham labs, we have 3 new postdocs this year.  Jen Lemon is based in the Boreham lab and will be studying oxidative damage in whitefish embryos in response to stressors such as temperature, radiation and chemicals.  John Eme and Casey Mueller will focus on temperature effects on respiration and cardiovascular function in these fish.

Besides an update on our research progress, we spent part of our time discussing research plans for this year.  It will be an exciting year as we plan to expand our studies to round whitefish, a species reported to be more temperature sensitive than lake whitefish.

Kincardine was a great spot to hold these meetings, right on the shores of Lake Huron where our field sampling takes place.  The leaves were just beginning to turn and it was a great fall research retreat.

Here is our group out at dinner and at our meetings!

Team Whitefish out for dinner

Team Whitefish