The laboratory's current research spans a wide range of topics, including:
- evolutionary ecology (ecological mechanisms of speciation and morphogenesis, ecological and genetic aspects of reticulate speciation, variability of fish life cycles and reproductive systems, intra- and interpopulation variability of different trait systems in fish as a basis for the emergence of adaptations);
- the ecology of individual fish species and the structure of fish populations in aquatic communities (fish reproductive ecology, growth, feeding, the dynamics of commercial fish populations, and the structure of fish populations in individual water bodies);
- anthropogenic impacts on fish, including commercial fishing and aquaculture (invasion ecology, reproductive and developmental disorders, ecotoxicology, assessment of commercial stock status and their rational use, improvement of aquaculture technologies, including the development of original methods for producing clonal sturgeon lines);
- conservation of biodiversity (phylogeny and systematics of individual fish groups, faunistics and zoogeography, development of measures to protect rare and endangered species).
- this diversity of topics is matched by a wide range of methods used in the laboratory's research: from descriptive morphology and morphometrics, traditional methods for studying feeding, age determination, and growth rate of fish, to molecular phylogenetics, phylogeography, karyology, isotope and trace-element analysis, and mathematical modeling.
