Effects of Low Thiamine in Wild Salmon

Fishy Fridays

Weekly spotlight on fisheries science journal articles

 

Jeff Kopaska
AFS Executive Director
jkopaska@fisheries.org

Happy Fishy Friday!

Today’s paper caught my eye because I have read a few items regarding the introduction of salmon to the Great Lakes. I was aware of the variety of issues that caused the decline of the Lake Trout, including the thiamine issue due to the Alewife diet.  I was unaware that similar issues were prevalent in other salmonids, or of the high offspring mortality due to thiamine deficiency in Chinook Salmon eggs. I learned quite a bit about how the physiology of Chinook Salmon can affect their spawning ability and success, and I had to look up a few terms that I previously had no familiarity with. That’s the joy of expanding your horizons by reading new and different things! The authors predicted results were not what they found through the course of the research, another joy! While this paper is certainly outside my wheelhouse, I liked that the physiological assessment tied back to the problem of reproductive success, contemplated different ecological niches for the jack males, hooknose males, and females, and linked to the management challenge of performing a thiamine bath for salmon eggs to decrease offspring mortality. Enjoy!

Low thiamine concentrations are associated with altered cardiac morphology across reproductive life histories of spawning Chinook Salmon (open access)