Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center

Home About Director's Overview History of Center Employee Directory Map to Center Partners State Field Stations Lake City, Minnesota La Crosse, Wisconsin Bellevue, Iowa Great Rivers, Illinois Open River, Missouri Havana, Illinois Field Station Directory Science Programs Aquatic Ecosystem Health River Ecology Long Term Resource Monitoring Wildlife Ecology Geospatial Sciences and Technology Science Initiatives Science Topics Data and Tools Publications Software Multimedia News

Fish Reports

2006 Report

Open River, Upper Mississippi River 2006 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 2006. Information on changes in fish catch over all years can be obtained from the Graphical Fish Database Browser.

• 159 fish collections were conducted using five gear types (Table 2.5). Of the 159 collections, 132 were from randomly selected sites. Eighteen collections were from tributary fixed sites and 9 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).

• The 2006 spring water rise was weak and short lived—lasting only from mid April to early May.  The river during summer through mid-fall was slightly lower than normal and a small fall rise occurred in late November and lasted through early December.  Samples were only affected by water level in late October leaving one site inaccessible (Table 2.5; Figure 1.5).
  
  
• 5,760 fish were collected representing 58 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 2006 season was 106. No new species were collected during 2006.
  
  
• Species captured that are Missouri-listed species of special concern included: Striped Mullet (3), Silver Chub (3), and Blue sucker (30) (Table 3.5).
  
  
• Three species of Asian carp were captured and included Grass carp (13), Bighead carp (2), and Silver carp (12) (Table 3.5).   These are exotic fish species that have been 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.

 

 

---

Content manager: Jennie Sauer

Page Last Modified: April 17, 2018