Emily Fergusson (center) instructs contractors Jacqueline Mitchell (right) and Michael Kohan (left) on the finer details of zooplankton identification in ABL's FEDZ Laboratory.
The Fish Energy Diet and Zooplankton (FEDZ) Laboratory at ABL recently increased its capability for processing a backlog of biological samples, with the addition of two new contract technicians. Collections of zooplankton and juvenile salmon samples are being processed from the Southeast Coastal Monitoring (SECM) project and the Southeast Sustainable Salmon Fund (SSSF) Taku Inlet project.
The SECM project is examining interannual patterns in early marine ecology of the five species of juvenile Pacific salmon in northern and southern Southeast Alaska, while the Taku project is a multi-agency, cooperative project examining hatchery-wild interactions of chum salmon in the Taku River estuary.
Processing by the FEDZ Laboratory includes zooplankton volumes and species composition to assess prey fields, detailed stomach content analyses to examine fish diet, and calorimetry to determine whole body energy content as a measure of relative condition. Contractors Jacqueline Mitchell and Michael Kohan are now working with ABL scientists Molly Sturdevant and Emily Fergusson to complete sample series collected in 2004 and 2005.
