Improving conservation of fish populations through connectivity: the importance of swimming performance and biomechanics

Access to quality habitat is essential to maintaining healthy fish populations. Natural and anthropogenic features of the riverscape such as falls, dams or road crossings may hinder fish movements and lead to loss of connectivity between complementary habitats. The knowledge of fish swimming performance and mechanics is critical to assessing the ability of individual species to surmount environmental barriers. Although swimming performance has been studied for many species, the most common methods used to measure it greatly underestimate the abilities of free-swimming fish. Moreover, little is known about sprinting performance of fish as well as their swimming behavior and kinematics at high speeds. This information is nevertheless essential to develop reliable swimming performance metrics, identify complete or partial barriers to fish movements and propose mitigation measures in order to improve conservation of fish populations. It may also be useful to develop exclusion devices for invasive species. As part of an ongoing postdoctoral project, I characterize swimming performance and locomotion patterns of various species of diadromous and freshwater fish such as eel, trout, salmon, sturgeon and lampreys in a large, open flume connected to the river. I propose to do collaborative research at Harvard University to learn biomechanics analysis techniques and

Faculty Supervisor:

Marco R. Rodriguez

Student:

Partner:

Harvard University

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Program: