News & Updates

This year, we had five teams and a total of 20 people working hard to collect samples and data from a variety of locations between May and July. Special thanks to all private landowners for their cooperation this year, as well as in past years!

Join two team members, Alison Derry and Andrew Hendry, as they are interviewed for a broadcast of the Big Biology Podcast. The podcast co-hosts will interview their guests with a live audience on June 29 at the Kenai Peninsula College. There will be an opportunity for members of the public to ask questions afterwards.

How do we decide which species should be introduced in lakes undergoing restoration? And how do we decide which source populations to use? Read our recently published paper in Ecology & Evolution outlining the details of the experimental design and fish introductions conducted in 2019 that started the project.

Can we predict evolutionary outcomes if we know starting conditions? Do the products of evolution in nature differ from those studied in well-controlled lab experiments? Katie Peichel and  Andrew Hendry discuss these questions and the on-going experiment in Episode 106 of the Big Biology Podcast. 

This year, we have five teams conducting fieldwork in the Mat-Su Valley and the Kenai Peninsula. The first team arrives in May soon after the ice has melted off the lakes and the sticklebacks start breeding. Fieldwork continues throughout the summer until mid-July.

Researchers from Switzerland, Canada and the US met for a weekend retreat in Gault Nature Reserve in Mont Saint-Hilaire to discuss projects, present results and plan the next field season.

Grant Haines et al. have published their work on stickleback populations in the Cook Inlet investigating the dimensionality and modularity of adaptive variation. The sampling took place in summer 2018  and the data was used to determine which lakes to use as source populations for restocking the experimental lakes.

Research technician Kelly Ireland has written an article describing the project and our fieldwork in the most recent issue of the Newsletter of the Alaska Chapter of the American Fisheries Society.