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The overall goal of our research on threespine stickleback is to understand the causes of phenotypic diversity and the origin and persistence of species. The threespine stickleback is found in coastal areas throughout the northern hemisphere, but the height of their diversity is here in BC. This diversity culminates in the limnetic-benthic species pairs, but also includes single-species populations at every stage of divergence. The repetition of evolutionary outcomes, the rapid rate at which this diversity has come about, and the ability to make laboratory crosses between even the most divergent forms has made the system attractive for evolutionary study. Our NSERC funded research includes observations and experiments on foraging, growth, survival, competition, predator evasion, parasite resistance, cues used in mating, natural selection pressures, and genetics. The Mike Lake population of threespine stickleback is of interest because it represents lakes in BC that are physically similar to the species-pair lakes and have the same species composition (stickleback and cutthroat or rainbow trout). Hence this population is important to our overall investigation of rapid evolution in the threespine stickleback complex. We wish to continue our studies to better understand the mechanisms that have shaped its phenotype and genotype.