Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center
2003 Report
Open River, Upper Mississippi River 2003 Fish Collection Summary
This report is a bullet summary of the Long
Term Resource Monitoring Program's (LTRMP) fish collection efforts
conducted by the Open
River Field Station on the Open
River, Upper Mississippi River, during 2003. Information on changes
in fish catch over all years can be obtained from the Graphical
Fish Database Browser.
- Additional funding from the Missouri Department of Conservation allowed
for complete LTRMP fish monitoring in the Open River (all gears, all
sampling periods).
- 167 fish collections were conducted using five gear types (Table
2.5).
- Sample allocations were affected by water levels in periods 2 and
3 as side channel sites and one tributary fixed site were inaccessible.
No electrofishing was completed during period 1 because of shocking control
box failure (Table 2.5; Figure
1.5).
- Of the 167 fish collections, 139 were from randomly selected sites.
Fourteen collections were from tributary fixed sites and 14 were from
main channel border, unstructured fixed sites.
- Side channel border, main channel border-unstructured, and main channel border, wing dam strata received the most sampling effort. The tributary
stratum received the least amount of sampling effort (Table
2.5).
- 4,947 fish were collected representing 50 species and 1 hybrid (Table
3.5). This total excludes 6 unidentifiable larval fish, 1 unidentifiable
Scaphirhynchus, 6 unidentifiable Macrhybopsis, 1 unidentifiable Cyprinid,
and 8 unidentifiable Catostomids.
- Historically, 129 fish species have been collected from the Open River
(Pitlo et al. 1995).
- The LTRMP species total for Open River before the 2003 season was
105. No new species were collected during 2003.
- Missouri-listed species of special concern
collected included Mississippi silvery minnow (2), pugnose minnow (13), blue
sucker (5), and mooneye (2; Table 3.5).
- Three species of Asian carp were collected and included grass carp
(5), bighead carp (14), and silver carp (5). The exotic fish species
were accidentally released into the Mississippi River System.
- Mean catch-per-unit-effort and standard error for fish collected
by gears using stratified random (Tables
4.5–11.5) and fixed-site sampling (Tables
14.5–19.5) for each stratum are shown.
- Length distributions for selected species of fish are shown in Figures 1 to 17.
Content manager: Jennie Sauer
Page Last Modified: April 17, 2018