About the Conover Fish Ecology Laboratory

About the Conover Fish Ecology Laboratory

Our research involves the ecology and evolutionary biology of fishes and the application of this knowledge to fisheries science. In general, we seek to understand the adaptive significance of reproductive, behavioral, physiological, or life history traits in fishes. The goal is to increase our knowledge of the adaptive responses of fish populations to both natural (biotic and abiotic factors) and un-natural (fishing) selection and to extend this knowledge to fundamental problems in resource management. We believe that population dynamics of fishes cannot be understood by treating natural mortality as a constant composed of unknown sources. Our goal is to identify stage-specific and population-specific mechanisms of natural mortality. We do this in a variety of ways, but most commonly, our approach is to study how agents of natural selection and the adaptive responses of local fish populations change across clearly defined ecological gradients, such as latitude. Field studies are used to establish patterns of phenotypic change in nature and common garden experiments are used to disentangle genetic from environmental influences. Our observations demonstrate that adaptation to local environmental change is far more prevalent than currently believed, even in open marine populations with extensive gene flow.

Our approach involves long-term studies of ecologically or economically important yet taxonomically diverse species along the U.S. Atlantic coast. These species include primarily the Atlantic silverside, Menidia menidia , the bluefish, Pomatomus saltatrix , and the striped bass Morone saxatilis .