Our recent research has confirmed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, some salmon appear able to regulate their metabolism in response to increasing hypoxia. This unexpected characteristic has the potential to contribute significantly to survival during critical environmental events (e.g. hypoxia) experienced during culture. Furthermore, the observation of individual variation raises the possibility of being able to select for the characteristic. However, before this can be done key questions around the phenotypic expression of regulation need to be addressed: is the ability to regulate innate or does exposure to one or more hypoxic episodes cause salmon to express the ability to regulate? This research will first provide baseline data on the proportion of salmon from different and unrelated families (family information and fish will be provided by SALTAS) that regulate and then investigate the effect of the transfer to seawater, fish size, stage, and environmental history on this ability. Ultimately the research will contribute to determining which phenotypic characteristics have a genetic basis and would therefore be valuable in selecting for a more robust salmon.
This research is strongly aligned with the Fisheries Research and Development Corporations R&D Plan for 2005-2010 and the strategic challenge of Natural Resource Sustainability. It directly addresses the challenge for the Tasmanian salmon industry to manage the effects of a changing climate through understanding how environmental variables affect the physiology of salmon and what level of phenotypic variation exists in the population. In the “Tasmanian Fisheries and Aquaculture Research and Development Strategic Plan 2005-2008” the relevant research and development priorities are “climate variability” and “genetic improvement”. This research directly addresses climate variability with the affects of hypoxia on salmon physiology and genetic improvement by testing fish from different and unrelated families to determine if oxygen regulation is an innate or learned response to a variable climate.
