Melissa Sanders is a senior majoring in the Conservation and Recreation BS degree in the WILD department.  She has worked in Dr. Chris Luecke’s laboratory for the past three years and has been the field assistant for one of his PhD students during the past two summers at the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska.  Melissa has done an excellent job assisting with the collection of fish, invertebrate, and water samples in a variety of lakes near this field station. 

Last spring, Melissa began an independent study on the environmental factors that affect growth of fish in these lakes.  As part of this process, she reviewed a number of papers on this subject and came up with a way to assess growth conditions for 14 fish populations.  Then she evaluated how well the variation in growth rates correlated with different environmental factors.  Results of her analyses were novel and striking.  The environmental conditions that had the greatest effect on growth were different for the two most common species of fish, Arctic grayling and lake trout.  Individual lake trout grew best in large, deep lakes that were inhabited by other species of fish.  Grayling grew best in smaller lakes where they were frequently the only species present.  From these results, Melissa inferred that the biological interactions between lake trout and grayling were the mechanisms explaining the opposite correlations between lake size and fish growth for these two species. 

Melissa Sanders presented these results in a poster at the “Posters on the Hill” event in January.  She is planning to use this research to participate in the Student Showcase event in April. 

Based on the quality of her work, Melissa Sanders was chosen as CNR’s  Undergraduate Research Award for 2007-08.