Looking For Other Information About Stippled Studfish Habitat

We've largely finished our sampling of the Tallapoosa basin for stippled studfish, and I think we've demonstrated that the species' range is relatively limited. I've found two sources of information about the physical condition of this basin. The first is Professor Han from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, who's a geographer working with remoting sensing data. He has a set of images that show the Tallapoosa River and Little Tallapoosa River to be largely eutrophic (nutrient enriched), with the exceptions of the impoundments Lake Wedowee (a.k.a. Harris Reservoir) and Lake Martin which are strangely low nutrient. Some of the Tallapoosa tributaries where we collected stippled studfish such as Hillabee Creek show up as low nutrient too, which would be my guess from having seen the clear water of the creek. And this low nutrient environment is crucial to stippled studfish, since they don't do well with creeks with algae growing both on the bottom and in the water column.

The other source of information is something I'd heard of before but hadn't thought to check for this project until I stumbled upon it last week. The U.S. Geological Survey has done a series of Aquatic GAP projects around the country, which basically assess aquatic habitat as being suitable for various species. There is a GAP group based at Auburn who have a very extensive list of likely habitat maps for fish species in the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa rivers system. Stippled studfish are of course really only found in the Tallapoosa, and the GAP map shows likelihoods of finding the species in various parts of the Tallapoosa that generally correspond to whether or not we found the species. For instance, for most of the Cleburne/Randolph counties area the map shows a low likelihood of finding stippled studfish, and we certainly didn't find the species in that area. But the map shows a reasonable likelihood of finding the species in parts of Georgia in which stippleds haven't been seen in ten years or more, so it's an imperfect system. I hope to get some of their published work soon so that I have a better idea exactly how they made these decisions.

We're making progress on the telescope shiner article. Brittany has devised a third figure that represents monthly ovarian maturation status from February through August. That was the last missing results piece, so hopefully the article will come together now. We have three figures and a table for major results, so we can move on to writing that up and weave together a Discussion of what it all means. I still lean towards submitting it to the journal American Midland Naturalist out of Notre Dame.