Receiver deployment.
Tuesday, June 9
10:00 a.m.
The Laurentian Great Lakes support ecologically and economically important fisheries throughout the basin; yet despite their importance, little is known about the spatial and temporal movements of these stocks. In 2010 a basinwide effort was launched to provide fishery managers with information regarding the ecology, biology, and population dynamics previously impossible to obtain through traditional assessment surveys. To date, 90 individual projects representing 335 researchers from academic, state, provincial, federal and non-profit organizations have released more than 13,000 tagged fish, generating over 600 million fish detections. This information has been used to inform native fish restoration and inform control actions associated with aquatic invasive species.
CHRISTOPHER VANDERGOOT is the director of the Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System and associate professor at Michigan State University. Prior to his current position, Chris served as a research fishery biologist at the Lake Erie Biological Station, Great Lakes Science Center, US Geological Survey located in Sandusky, Ohio, supervisor of fish biology at the Sandusky Fisheries Research Station, and a fisheries biologist on Lake Erie with the Ohio Department of Natural Resource, Division of Wildlife. As a fisheries researcher and biologist, he is interested in understanding and quantifying the population dynamics of native Great Lakes fish populations, particularly Lake Erie percids. He primarily focuses on conducting field-based studies that describe the ecological and demographic processes of wild fish populations for stock assessment modeling purposes. Specific areas of interest include examining stock discreteness, rates of iteoparity (i.e., frequency of reproductive cycles), spawning site fidelity, spawning phenology, migratory behavior, and estimating mortality rates (i.e., fishing and natural). He has also conducted numerous studies evaluating the efficiency and performance of fishery-independent sampling gears and methodologies. Chris received his bachelor’s degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Statue University, his master’s degree from Tennessee Technological University and doctorate from Michigan State University.
