New year for MAPS

A new year for MAPS with lots of exciting work in the pipeline! Plans for a habitat mapping workshop, setting up new stationary antennas and fieldwork in sunny Portugal.

But first let’s check in with what we got up to in 2022: A large part of the work conducted in Sweden involved running traps for both downstream migrating juveniles in the spring and upstream migrating adults in the fall. Now we have a comprehensive view of the sea trout population in our study stream and smolt productivity.

There was a big PIT tagging effort from the team in three countries. With help from collaborators in the ICES working group WGTRUTTA we now have hundreds of juveniles in Sweden, Norway and France tagged ready to follow their journey to sea come spring.

Sample analysis is under way on two fronts. Tissue collected from individuals coming through the trap is being analysed to determine sex. This will give us a picture of what the sex ratio of outward migrating smolts is like in our study stream. As well as this, ventricles are being processed to investigate how heart structure differs between offspring with differing parental migration strategy.

Let’s hope for another successful year in 2023!