With a bit of expertise, the right facilities, and a lot of patience and hard work, it is possible to rear salmon eggs from fertilization all the way to the 1-2 year-old smolt stage.  Our lab has completed numerous projects that involved traveling to spawning grounds throughout British Columbia, collecting the sperm and eggs of spawning salmon, and rearing their offspring here at UBC. With this approach we can ask questions about intergenerational effects. Do some mothers produce better offspring than others? Do stressed spawning salmon produce inferior offspring? Does water temperature during incubation affect offspring survival? We answer these questions by monitoring survival and measuring behavioural and physiological traits at different life stages of salmon development. Our lab uses a swim flume (analogous to a tread mill for humans) to test the swimming ability of young salmon from different mothers, populations, or species. We also look at morphological (body size, fin size), behavioural (aggression, predator avoidance, feeding), and physiological (stress hormones, metabolism) differences among offspring. In addition to adding to our understanding of salmon biology, we have used fish reared at UBC to validate and refine the transmitter implantation methods our lab uses for tracking salmon smolts in the wild.

Selected Publications

Furey, N.B, A.L. Bass, K.M. Miller, S. Li, A.G. Lotto, S.J. Healy, S.M. Drenner, and S.G. Hinch. 2021. Infected juvenile salmon experience increased predation risk during freshwater migration. Royal Society Open Science. 8: 201522. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201522

Rechisky, E.L., A.D. Porter, S.D. Johnston,  C.F. Stephenson, S.G. Hinch, B.P.V. Hunt, D.W. Welch. 2021. Exposure time of wild, juvenile sockeye salmon to open-net-pen Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia, Canada. North American Journal of Fisheries Management. 41:650–660; 10.1002/nafm.10574

Banet, A.I., Healy, S.J., Eliason, E.J., Roualdes, E.A., Patterson, D.A., Hinch, S.G. 2019. Simulated maternal stress reduces offspring aerobic swimming performance in Pacific salmon. Conservation Physiology. 7 (1), coz095, https://doi.org/10.1093/conphys/coz095

Stevenson C.F., S.G. Hinch, A.D. Porter, E.L. Rechisky, D.W. Welch, S.J. Healy, A.G. Lotto, and N.B. Furey. 2019. The influence of smolt age on freshwater and early marine behavior and survival of migrating juvenile sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka). Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. 148 (3): 636-651

Eliason, E.J., Gale, M.K., Whitney, C.K., Lotto, A., Hinch, S.G. 2017. Intraspecific differences in endurance swim performance and cardiac size in sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) fry. Canadian Journal of Zoology 95(6):425-432.

Healy, S.J., Hinch, S.G., Porter, A.D., Rechisky, E.L., Welch, D.W., Eliason, E.J., Lotto, A.G., Furey, N.B. 2017. Route-specific movements and survival during early marine migration of hatchery steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) smolts in coastal British Columbia. Marine Ecology Progress Series 577:131-147.

Sopinka, N.M., Hinch, S.G., Middleton, C.T., Hills, J.A., Patterson, D.A. (2014) Mother knows best, even when stressed? Effects of maternal exposure to a stressor on offspring performance at different life stages in a wild semelparous fish. Oecologia 175:493-500.

For other publications, please see our Publications page.