Little River (Clinch River tributary)

Transcription

We're trying to better describe distribution, occurrence, and abundance of southern tessellated darter in Florida. They are an imperiled species. And really there is not a whole bunch known in Florida about where they occur. They've only been found, historically, in six locations. Those locations have all been in the Ocklawaha River basin. So anyways, this species is...there's an isolated population in Florida, and they don't...are not known to occur again until you get to Altamaha River basin in Georgia. With this management plan being written and not much known about where they are at in Florida, we've decided to actually go out and target the species. We're kick-seining. We're using this seine and a backpack electrofisher. So...two people hold the seine and one person has a backpack on, and we put electricity into the water. And to make that current and help the fish go into the seine we kick the water, that's how we're sampling. "We got, we got!" "We got a darter!" And at each one of those locations we sample 50 meters of...of the stream. Then we take a habitat parameter, like velocity and substrate and depth and stream width. Another thing we're doing is keeping track of all of the species that we get at each site. And keeping track of all the darters and how many darters we find at each site. So, we've worked with GIS analyst out of Tallahassee with FWC, Mark Barrett, and he mapped different tributaries and distributaries of Ocklawaha River from Silver River all the way down to St. John's River. We've randomly picked a number of locations in each one of those areas to go out. We're working cooperatively with USGS, Howard Jelks, U.S. Geological Survey in Gainesville, and Jim Austin out of University of Florida. People are helping us out up in Georgia, and than South Carolina and North Carolina. They are collecting tessellated darters. We are going to compare the population in Florida to those populations. We don't have an estimate of how many southern tessellated darters are in Florida. That's the next phase of this project. So far to date we've only found fifteen. In the areas that we actually find them we're going to go back and get estimates of how many darters there are per length of the stream to get an abundance estimate.