Shortjaw cisco COSEWIC assessment and status report: chapter 12

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Special Significance of the Species

The shortjaw cisco, along with the lake herring, appears to be the ancestral colonizing species for most of the post-glacial distribution region of the Mississippi Refugium (Todd and Smith 1992). Within the Great Lakes, the shortjaw cisco represented one lineage in the most spectacular radiation of sympatric forms in northern lakes (Smith and Todd 1984). It is a unique form with a distribution that is intimately tied with post-glacial hydrology, and is thus of great scientific interest. Presumably, its morphological differences from the lake herring group of ciscoes “adapt” it in some unique, but as yet unrevealed, manner to survival in northern aquatic ecosystems because of its persistence throughout the past millenia. Food fisheries in the Great Lakes, especially, included the species as part of a highly desirable and commercialized smoked chub market, but it was not considered more desirable than other cisco species of its same size and condition.