Fine‐scale acoustic telemetry reveals unexpected lake trout,Salvelinus namaycush, spawning habitats in northern Lake Huron, North America

Abstract

Previous studies of lake trout, Salvelinus namaycush, spawning habitat in the Laurentian Great Lakes have used time-and labour-intensive survey methods and have focused on areas with historic observations of spawning aggregations and on habitats prejudged by researchers to be suitable for spawning. As an alternative, we used fine-scale acoustic telemetry to locate, describe and compare lake trout spawning habitats. Adult lake trout were implanted with acoustic transmitters and tracked during five consecutive spawning seasons in a 19-27 km 2 region of the Drummond Island Refuge, Lake Huron, using the VEMCO Positioning System. Acoustic telemetry revealed discrete areas of aggregation on at least five reefs in the study area, subsequently confirmed by divers to contain deposited eggs. Notably, several identified spawning sites would likely not have been discovered using traditional methods because either they were too small and obscure to stand out on a bathymetric map or because they did not conform to the conceptual model of spawning habitat held by many biologists. Our most unique observation was egg deposition in gravel and rubble substrates located at the base of and beneath overhanging edges of large boulders. Spawning sites typically comprised <10% of the reef area and were used consistently over the 5-year study. Evaluation of habitat selection from the perspective of fish behaviour through use of acoustic transmitters offers potential to expand current conceptual models of critical spawning habitat. K E Y W O R D SLaurentian Great Lakes, positional acoustic telemetry, spawning habitat selection, spawning reefs, VEMCO positioning system

Revealing migration and reproductive habitat of invasive fish under an active population suppression program

“…The spatially correlated random effect indicated several “hot spots” near confirmed spawning areas and several unconfirmed sites in the South and Southeast arms. We believe that latent processes (Zuur et al, ), possibly resulting from site‐specific habitat characteristics (Binder et al, ; Marsden et al, ), further influence spatial patterns in residency. However, further investigations are required to test this hypothesis.…”

“…The spatially correlated random effect indicated several "hot spots" near confirmed spawning areas and several unconfirmed sites in the South and Southeast arms. We believe that latent processes (Zuur et al, 2017), possibly resulting from site-specific habitat characteristics (Binder et al, 2018;Marsden et al, 2016), further influence spatial (Ogburn et al, 2017), these programs can present major logistical and analytical challenges because the configuration of telemetry arrays may need to be modified to meet shifting project objectives (Buckley, 2008) or support may become limited (e.g., equipment, financial, in-kind, and technical, Crossin et al, 2017). Tagging hundreds of fish may not effectively show the expected behavioral patterns of the population, which, in our study, could partly explain why migratory trajectories were not apparent at several confirmed spawning sites.…”

Use of an acoustic telemetry array for fine scale fish behaviour assessment of captive Paiche, Arapaima gigas, breeders

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