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A Salmon of the Mountains
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The
Mysis Crisis
As
the Mysis shrimp was introduced into the Kootenay Lake system, biologists
duly included it in their periodic monitoring, and it was this data
that, by the early seventies, began to set off alarm bells in the
the scientific community.
The shrimp were multiplying rapidly, and feeding on Daphnia,
the primary food of the kokanee, yet very few Mysis were showing
up in the guts of either rainbows or kokanee.
The normal algae/Daphnia/kokanee/rainbow food chain was being
disrupted by what one of the biologists called “the Mysis shunt,”
which was algae/Daphnia/Mysis/question mark. In other words, the Mysis were happily consuming, but rarely
being consumed. Exploring
further, the scientists stumbled on to a fundamental problem; the
daily migrations of the Mysis
were completely out of phase with the daily migrations of the kokanee.
At sunrise the kokanee would rise to near the surface to
feed, at the same time that the light-shy Mysis would migrate to
the lower depths of the lake. |
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