Whether or not baiting influences stickleback catch per unit effort (CPUE) remains a matter of debate among stickleback researchers: While the opinions about the impact of baiting on CPUE differ, supporting quantitative data are scarce. The effect of baiting and trap type on nine-spined stickleback (Pungitius pungitius) CPUE was studied in a field experiment conducted over four consecutive days...

Despite longstanding interest in parallel evolution, little is known about the genes that control similar traits in different lineages of vertebrates. Pelvic reduction in stickleback fish (family Gasterosteidae) provides a striking example of parallel evolution in a genetically tractable system. Previous studies suggest that cis-acting regulatory changes at the Pitx1 locus control pelvic reduct...

Collective motion describes the global properties of moving groups of animals and the self-organized, coordinated patterns of individual behaviour that produce them. We examined the group-level patterns and local interactions between individuals in wild, free-ranging shoals of three-spine sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus. Our data reveal that the highest frequencies of near-neighbour encoun...

Elucidation of the genetic mechanisms convergent evolution, evolution similar or same phenotypes in phylogenetically independent lineages, helps predict how populations will respond to selective pressures. Convergent can be caused by either fixation identical-by-descent alleles, mutations at gene, different genes controlling trait. To what extent does alleles lead isolated where inflow adaptive...

Receiver-bias models of signal evolution predict that male sexually selected traits evolve through prior selection for other functions. Female three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in many populations show a mating preference for males with a red throat and jaw. It has been proposed that this preference evolved because the choice of males with red coloration confers direct and indi...

Specialization for the use of different resources can lead to ecological speciation. Accordingly, there are numerous examples of ecologically specialized pairs of fish "species" in postglacial lakes. Using a polymorphic panel of single nucleotide variants, we tested for genetic footprints of within-lake population stratification in nine-spined sticklebacks (Pungitius pungitius) collected from t...

A freshwater fish inventory was conducted from March through August, 2002 in the Alagnak Watershed. The objectives of the inventory were (1) to document species that were expected yet undocumented and (2) to provide initial descriptions of the distributions, abundance, and biologic characteristics of these species. Minnow traps, minnow seines, beach seines, snorkel gear, hand nets, fyke nets, t...