I am an ecologist that believes strongly in a broad liberal-arts education and interdisciplinary research approaches. I began my academic career at Macalester College, moving from my hometown of Palouse, Washington to pursue a biology degree. While my passion has always been ecology, my career included significant detours into analytical chemistry and medical device engineering. Eventually, I combined my skills and interests, earning a PhD degree studying fish migration using chemical records stored in the ear bones of salmon. My current research includes studies of trout and salmon in the Pacific Northwest as well as “goliath” catfish and critically endangered sawfish in Amazon region of Brazil.
* denotes student co-author
2022
Chittaro, P., Jens C. Hegg, Abby Fuhrman, Devin Robichaux, Rothboury Doung, Brian Beckman, Chris Fisher, Jeff Vervoort, and Brian Kennedy. 2022. “The incorporation of environmentally derived 87Sr/86Sr and Sr/Ca in early otolith formation of Chinook salmon” Ecology of Freshwater Fish. DOI: 10.1111/eff.12673
2021
Hegg, Jens C., Brian P. Kennedy. “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again: Non-linear time-series matching as a tool for mining temporally structured data in ecology” Ecosphere. DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.3742
Hegg, Jens C., *Breanna Graves, Chris M. Fisher. “Sawfish, Read in Tooth and Saw: rostral teeth as endogenous chemical records of movement and life-history in a critically endangered species” Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems. DOI: 10.1002/aqc.3635
*Carine G. Moraes, Jens C. Hegg, Tommaso Giarrizzo, Marcelo C. Andrade. “Feeding behavior and trophic niche partitioning between co-existing river otter species” Hydrobiologia. DOI: 10.1007/s10750-021-04614-w
2019
Chittaro, P. M., Jens C. Hegg, Brian P. Kennedy, Laurie A. Weitkamp, Lyndal L. Johnson, Cynthia Bucher, Richard W. Zabel. “Juvenile river residence and performance of Snake River fall Chinook salmon” Ecology of Freshwater Fish DOI: 10.1111/eff.12462
2018
Hegg, Jens C., Brian P. Kennedy, Paul Chittaro. “What did you say about my mother? The complexities of maternally derived chemical signatures in otoliths” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. DOI: 10.1139/cjfas-2017-0341
Hegg, Jens C., Jonathan Middleton, Ben Luca Robertson. “The Sound of Migration: Exploring data sonification as a means of interpreting multivariate salmon movement datasets” Heliyon. DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00532
2015
Hegg, Jens C., Tommaso Giarrizzo, Brian P. Kennedy. “Diverse Early Life-History Strategies in Migratory Amazonian Catfish: Implications for Conservation and Management”. PLOS One. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0129697
2013
Hegg, Jens C., Brian P. Kennedy, Alex K. Fremier. “Predicting fish location using otoliths and bedrock geology: Understanding the effects of geologic heterogeneity”. Chemical Geology. DOI: 10.1016/j.chemgeo.2013.10.010
Hegg, Jens C., Brian P. Kennedy, Paul M. Chittaro, and Richard W. Zabel. "Spatial structuring of an evolving life-history strategy under altered environmental conditions." Oecologia. DOI: 10.1007/s00442-012-2564-9
How do animals, in the midst of a patchy and variable landscape, balance the resources and risks they know in the now, against the unknown risks and rewards in a future they cannot know?
I am interested in how animals solve this balancing act. Migratory species must not only balance risks and rewards through time, but also across space as they make lengthy migrations. Rewards like faster growth or higher survival rarely occur across the entire migratory path, nor do the risks. In fish, where most of my research is focused, these important drivers of migration behavior are often hyper-local, related to environmental conditions and community ecology at the scale of individual tributaries or river reaches.
To uncover these ecological interactions I use field research methods in addition to isotopic records stored within fish themselves. Hard parts such as teeth, scales, or otoliths (ear stones) record a detailed record of fish movements and life-history. Recovering them allows us to understand details of fish migration that are otherwise hidden.