SUNY Oswego leads Lake Ontario fisheries study in $1.5M Sea Grant research suite

SUNY Oswego biological sciences faculty members  Ellen Karboski and Nicholas Sard are leading a nearly $140,000 New York Sea Grant study assessing the status of Pacific salmon, which represent Lake Ontario's most popular recreational fishery.

In 2019, Pacific salmon returned approximately half a billion dollars to the New York state economy through license fees, gear sales and travel expenditures. While salmon numbers are managed through careful stocking to maintain a balance between salmon and their preferred prey, the proportion of hatchery fish in this area is now less than 50 percent, weakening the fisheries’ main lever of control over the population. 

The investigators will use seining (vertical suspended nets), in-stream cone-shaped fyke nets and electrofishing to collect and quantify juvenile salmon, assess the competition between stocked and wild salmon, and collect data to guide future management and restoration.

“Currently, Chinook and coho salmon population numbers in the lake are managed through stocking,” Karboski said. “However, salmon are successfully reproducing in tributaries along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, and about half of all adult salmon caught in the lake are of wild origin.”

The team will assess the amount of smolts, or juvenile salmon, in the ecosystem as a barometer for health. 

“In our project, we will begin a nearshore seining index survey to try and quantify the number of wild-produced smolts emerging from eastern Lake Ontario tributaries,” Karboski explained. “We are also developing a new, low-impact net design to sample outmigrating smolts in the small rivers and streams along the eastern shore of the lake.”

This project is one of a group of seven studies totalling $1.5 million dollars being administered by New York Sea Grant to directly address multiple high-priority community, economic and environmental objectives. 

Other Great Lakes studies in the suite include one on small, shrimp-like crustaceans that are critical links in its aquatic food web (Cornell University), and another on lake trout, a key species possibly facing impacts from invasive mussels (SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry). 

There are also four studies at Stony Brook University, one each focusing on aquaculture and fisheries and another two zeroing in on the impacts of PFAS, a family of contaminants that negatively impact all living organisms, including humans. 

For more information and to learn about the other six projects, read the complete NYSG press release.

Since 1971, New York Sea Grant, a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York, has been one of 34 university-based programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program. The extension portion of NYSG’s programming is administered through Cornell Cooperative Extension.

– Submitted by New York Sea Grant