Biotic and Abiotic Factors Affecting Feeding Success of Early Juvenile Lake Whitefish in Lakes Michigan and Huron North American Journal of Fisheries Management

Feeding success is associated with increased growth and survival during early life stages for fish, and understanding the factors that in fluence feeding success is a critical step toward predicting future recruitment to the fishery. The goal of our study was to test whether various biotic and abiotic factors, including prey abundance, fish abundance, and water temperature, affected the feeding success of early juvenile Lake White fishCoregonus clupeaformis from Lakes Michigan and Huron. Higher feeding success, which was determined using residuals from average weights of con- sumed prey for a given length fish, was associated with more rapid growth rates in length and depended on multiple