There has been an interesting find in Mistissini in recent months, and we’re not talking about another Mistissini Lake monster sighting!
There are a couple of ongoing projects called the Mistissini Lake study. One is on speckled trout, and the other is on walleye.
Dr. Louis Bernachez of the Université de Laval is supervising both studies, but it’s the speckled trout study that has people buzzing these days.
It turns out there are two “strands” of speckled trout around the Mistissini area.
“In a lot of species, what we find is there are important differences within the species, so what we found in Mistissini Lake is not all the speckled trout are the same,” according to Dylan Fraser, who is a PhD candidate for the Université de Laval, and is heading the brook trout study.
“These fish have a lot of genetic differences, behavioral differences in how they use the lake, the way they swim around,” he said. “There are two different groups, one being in the Rupert River, and the other being in the northeast rivers (Papas, Cheno, Takwa).”
The speckled trout project started in 2000, and the final report is slated to be out at the end of the summer of 2004.
