Blog: Spawning of the living dead: understanding how salmon pass thiamine deficiency to their young
This is no ordinary witch’s brew. It’s one part of the recipe to study thiamine deficiency in our California Central Valley Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations. In 2019, hatcheries noticed an eerie and shivering change in juvenile Chinook salmon. Offspring were laying on their side at the bottom of tanks, swimming in corkscrew motion (see video below), or not surviving at all. In other words, for many juvenile salmon, they were not quite dead, only slightly alive. … But now, we are left with a major question: how did these fish became thiamine deficient in the first place? And if this is being seen in our hatchery fish, what about the fish in the wild? To understand thiamine deficiency in salmon, we need to understand the past, present, and future using an array of different samples.