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Fish Reports

2005 Report

Open River, Upper Mississippi River 2005 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 2005. Information on changes in fish catch over all years can be obtained from the Graphical Fish Database Browser.

• 136 fish collections were conducted using five gear types (Table 2.5). Of the 136 collections, 111 were from randomly selected sites. Fifteen collections were from tributary fixed sites and 10 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.  Tributary strata received the least amount of sampling effort (Table 2.5).

• In 2005, water levels were lower than normal during April and early May (typically the peak flood period), but considerably higher than normal during late May and June. Sample allocations were affected by water level in the summer and fall periods as side channel sites and one tributary fixed site were inaccessible (Table 2.5; Figure 1.5).
  
  
• 4,948 fish were collected representing 45 species (Table 3.5).
  
  
• Historically, 129 fish species have been collected from the Open River (Pitlo et al. 1995).
  
  
• The LTRMP species total for Open River before the 2005 season was 106. No new species were collected during 2005.
  
  
• Species collected that are Missouri-listed species of special concern included Mississippi silvery minnow (1), river darter (1), blue sucker (5), and mooneye (2) (Table 3.5).
  
  
• Two species of Asian carp were collected and included grass carp (2) and silver carp (12). These are two species of Asian carp that were accidentally released into the Mississippi River system.
  
  
• Mean catch-per-unit-effort and standard error for stratified random and fixed-site sampling for each stratum are shown in the Open River tables. Length distributions for selected species of fish are shown in  Figures 1 to 17.

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Content manager: Jennie Sauer

Page Last Modified: April 17, 2018