Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Recent work has pointed to lakemounts as potentially critical features in large lake ecosystems, which, like\\\\\\\\r\\\\\\\\nseamounts in ocean environments, appear to be \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'hot spots\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\' that play a disproportionately large role in supporting\\\\\\\\r\\\\\\\\necosystem biodiversity and production. As such, lakemounts may represent refugia for coastal populations of fish suffering from human disturbance. Several mechanistic processes have been reviewed and proposed to be important at lakemounts in driving greater regional production. These processes include upwelling of deep, nutrient-rich hypolimnetic waters against the abupt topographies of lakemounts, both from large-scale currents and internal seiche events during stratification. Lakemounts also provide substrate for benthic organisms in an otherwise pelagic environment. Advective forces due to large-scale currents can also lead to deposition of algae and zooplankton through leeward eddy retention, and the trapping of vertically migrating organisms, making them vulnerable to predation by resident consumers. Here, we propose to compare the ecosystem productivity of lakemounts through a comparative approach, collecting size and abundance data of organisms at the Superior Shoal lakemount for comparison to similar data collected in both coastal and pelagic environments elsewhere on Lake Superior. This study will directly inform our understanding of how lakemounts contribute to the resiliency of large lake ecosystems to anthropogenic stressors like climate change and help inform management priorities for the fishes that inhabit them.

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