A Pleasant Afternoon At Limestone Creek

I went out yesterday with three students to Limestone Creek both to collect striped and scarlet shiners for various projects, and to do a sampling for diversity purposes. The first part was easy, getting fish for parasite, color and brain structure purposes. The second part was in particular for Jennifer's classwork. She's in a graduate Community Ecology class, and the lab component is independent study. I suggested that she sample fishes at our collecting site and analyze the diversity with various statistics.

I don't have all of the numbers in front of me, but we collected 99 individual fish mostly through seining. We worked a variety of microhabitats, from weedy riffles to gravel riffles to an open pool to a side run almost cut off by low water. Most common by far were scarlet and striped shiners, with reasonable numbers of stonerollers, blackspotted topminnows and black darters. We only netted one YOY largemouth bass, and no other sunfishes which was odd. The most interesting fish was a slender madtom, Noturus exilis, which we'd never encountered before. The madtom came out of the side run and was netted with a pushnet jammed up and under a low overhanging bank. I was hoping we'd find another flame chub, but I haven't found one at this stretch of creek since February. I'll post the numbers and descriptive statistics later when I get them.