New Project: Evaluating mysid abundance in Lake Michigan

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission recently funded a Cornell DNRE and CBFS group for a new two-year project “Evaluating mysid abundance in Lake Michigan using two decades of fisheries acoustic data.”  This project will involve DNRE graduate students Kayden Nasworthy and Tim O’Brien and is led by DNRE faculty members Jim Watkins, Lars Rudstam, Kade Keranen, Suresh Sethi (now CUNY Brooklyn), Tom Evans (now at SUNY Brockport), and Hannah Blair (now at Bigelow Lab). Shrimp-like mysids are an important prey item in the Great Lakes. They form a distinct layer in the water column at night, and traditional monitoring with nets has detected a long-term decline in Lake Michigan. Twenty years of lakewide fishery acoustic data will be reanalyzed for abundance and distribution of mysids. This dataset will enable our group to test our new hypothesis for the observed decline- that increasing water clarity has decreased the spatial extent of dark refuge for mysids from fish predation during the day. A key deliverable will be a new standard operating procedure for assessment of mysids in fishery acoustic data including utilizing machine learning methods.