Re: NANFA-- Stoneroller fry found

Bruce Stallsmith (fundulus_at_hotmail.com)
Mon, 21 May 2001 09:58:03 -0400

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A good question. For one thing, this stream is species depauperate. I've
only found stonerollers, green sunfish, Gambusia and bluegills present. My
initial ID was based on these YOY (young of year) looking like generic
larval cyprinids. This has been confirmed, in large part, by an article by
Gerald Buynak and Harold Mohr comparing the larval development of
stonerollers (_C. anomalum_ rather than my _C. oligolepis_), cutlips minnows
and river chubs with well-illustrated larval development series for each
species (thanks to the Scharpf library!). Most of the YOY I've collected to
date are a good match for their illustrations of fish shading from prolarvae
into postlarvae. In a collection yesterday I've found a few markedly larger
YOY, one about 10-11 mm long and several others about 8-9 mm. These actually
look like little fish with well-developed melanophores and a forking caudal.

The Buynak & Mohr article is from the journal The Progressive
Fish-Culturist. They describe these three species because they have some
utility as bait fish, and so they might be raised commercially. One of their
big conclusions is that it's difficult to tell the YOY of one of these
species from another; different size at the same stage is one of the better
clues. If there were more cyprinid species present in my study creek it
would be a more complicated study from having to separate two or more
species' YOY. I guess I'm lucky...

What I'm interested in is describing the appearance of different cohorts of
YOY, and how these grow over the next month or two.

--Bruce Stallsmith
Huntsville, AL

>From: Jay DeLong <thirdwind_at_att.net>
>Reply-To: nanfa_at_aquaria.net
>To: nanfa_at_aquaria.net
>Subject: Re: NANFA-- Stoneroller fry found
>Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 23:18:10 -0700
>
>How did you ID those tiny fry, Bruce?
>
>At 04:53 PM 5/15/01 -0400, you wrote:
>>I couldn't resist telling the list that I found the first Stoneroller fry
>>in the creek on campus this afternoon. I scooped out about 10 as my first
>>sample. They're all about 5 mm long, and slip through the mesh of a
>>standard store-bought aquarium net. I still haven't been able to find a
>>spawning mound, though... This seems to imply that the local breeding
>>season for them starts around May 1 which was my guesstimate.
>
>--
>Jay DeLong
>Olympia, WA

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