26 September 2025. The NFR-funded ECOLUMP project (see HERE and scroll down until you get to a description of this project) reaches another milestone! The team completed a field experiment to explore whether the orientation behavior of juvenile lumpfish varies according to the spawning location, and whether their behavior is inherited from their parents.
The team observed the behavior of 102 juvenile lumpfish in coastal waters around the Austevoll archipelago using the drifting in situ chambers (DISCs). The juveniles originated from parents coming from two different locations: Austevoll and Farsund.
The hypothesis is that juvenile fishes from parents coming from different geographical locations display different orientation and swimming behavior. This is because they would need to swim towards different directions to migrate and reach the ocean depending on their location of origin.
This experiment will also let us compare the orientation of lumpfish from the same location (Austevoll) but from two different breeding seasons (autumn vs spring).
The experiment was led by the Ph.D. student Gauthier Lorillard and IMR scientist Alessandro Cresci, with the support of the project leader, IMR scientist Caroline Durif, and project members Howard Browman and Anne Berit Skiftesvik. Glenn Sandtorv and two master students (Emma Dalland and Lou Blin) also helped with the experiment.
