Just Keep Swimming…..
Alfredo Ojanguren and student Mia Kent will visit the Institute for Hydrobiology and Fisheries Science of the University of Hamburg to work on a project exploring the effects of thermal experience on routine activity patterns at different temperatures in herring larvae. The project, funded in part by The Buckland Foundation, is a continuation of a summer studentship granted to Mia during the summer of 2012.
Last summer´s work with juvenile guppies resulted in a novel method to assess 3-dimensional swimming trajectories of small fish at different temperatures. This summer, we will collaborate with Professor Myron Peck and Dr Marta Moyano in an experiment to test larvae of a fishery-relevant species such as Atlantic herring.
In the South West Baltic Sea, herring spawn in the spring in shallow areas where water temperatures are highly variable and can range from 5 to 20 °C. We know that temperature experienced during early stages has permanent effects on fish phenotypes and we are interested in studying this developmental plasticity in variables such as routine swimming activity that affect larval survival. In addition, there is an urgent need to obtain realistic routine swimming speeds on this species in order to parameterize physiological individual-based models. The German team has extensive experience in applying these models to estimate larval survival under different environmental scenarios of prey availability and temperature.