Lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) and cisco (C. artedi) are two ecologically important prey fishes that exhibit similar spawning behaviors and early life-history strategies in Lake Ontario. CBFS PhD student Taylor Brown, Lars Rudstam, Suresh Sethi (Cornell) and several collaborators recently published a study investigating the extent to which larval cisco and lake whitefish distributions overlap across space and time within nursery areas. Larvae of both species were widely distributed and exhibited high overlap across multiple Lake Ontario nursery areas, though lake whitefish were less abundant and more narrowly distributed than cisco. Importantly, observed distributional differences between species were subtle, and the authors infer that these differences were likely driven by differential hatch timing and staggered ontogenetic habitat shifts. Combined, these results illustrate similar habitat use between cisco and lake whitefish through the larval stage and demonstrate that ontogeny and species-specific phenology influence their habitat use.
Brown, TA, LG Rudstam, JP Holden, BC Weidel, AS Ackiss, AJ Ropp, MA Chalupnicki, JE McKenna, Jr, and SA Sethi (2023). Larval cisco and lake whitefish exhibit high distributional overlap within nursery areas. Ecology of Freshwater Fish
