Students and professors at the University are collaborating on a project that will hopefully give them more insight on the lives of fish in Lake Erie.

The project, which began this summer, consists mainly of studying a small bone inside the head of fish called the otolith.

Studying the otolith could lead to a better understanding of fish’s spawning and migratory habits in Lake Erie, which will be beneficial for both environmental and economical reasons, said Todd Hayden, the doctoral student heading up the project.

“If spawning areas are destroyed, there will be no way of keeping the population going,” Hayden said. “But if we know where the fish are going to and coming from we can start to protect those critical areas.”

John Farver, associate professor of geology at the University, adds that studying the otolith will also provide more information for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources who manage fish as a food resource.

“The fishing industry in Ohio brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year between commercial and recreational fishing,” Farver said. “There is a clear economic tie to maintaining good fish stocks, having enough fish and having them be the right size to keep the fisherman coming.”

Along with Farver, Jeff Miner, associate professor of biology at the University, oversees the project. Miner said one of the experiments they are working on currently has to do with yellow perch.

This summer, a group of young perch, each about 2 centimeter in length, were put into 80 cages throughout Lake Erie for three weeks.

While there the fish ate other organisms in the water, causing their otolith to grow and take on the chemical composition of the water, Miner said.

“What we want to know is, if a fish that is caught in Maumee Bay, what sort of chemical signature does it have in its otolith that we can use to describe fish that come from Maumee Bay,” Miner said.

Currently, the group is preparing the otolith to be analyzed, a process which entails breaking the otolith and polishing it down with a fine grinding stone, Miner said.

During the next phase of the experiment, the otolith will be taken to the University of Windsor to use their inductively coupled mass spectrometer – a high-powered laser system.

“The machine uses a very small laser beam that burns a track in the otolith,” Hayden said. “The stuff that is removed from the otolith gets sucked into the mass spectrometer.”

The spectrometer will then give the researchers an estimate of the chemical composition at particular points on the otolith.

The otolith is just like a tree ring, Miner said, if you want to know the situation of the tree when it was two years old, you look at that spot on the trunk.

“For these fish, we take the same spot at the two-year mark on the otolith and hit it with a laser to tell us the chemical environment it was in at that particular time in its life,” Miner said.

While this study will help answer questions about spawning and migratory habits, Miner said, there are lots of other questions that need to be asked and will hopefully be answered in this three-year project.