Re: NANFA-- Little River, AL, trip

Bruce Stallsmith (fundulus_at_hotmail.com)
Wed, 29 May 2002 20:49:54 -0400

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In the interest of accurate reporting, I wanted to edit our species list
from last Saturday's Little River trip with thanks to Dave Neely. First
change--as list recorder, I put down that we had seen Alabama Shad since
Casper and Steven had seen a large school of deep-bodied fish upwards of a
foot long. 60 years ago these would probably have been largely Alabama Shad,
an anadromous species. But today they can't make it from the upper Coosa
River/Little River to the Gulf of Mexico because the Coosa is damned to form
the modern Lake Weiss. So no Alabama Shad in the area; maybe what was seen
was Skipjack Herring, Alosa chrysochloris. (I'm too nearsighted to snorkel
easily without a prescription mask, which I'm working on...)

The other mistake was my miscomprehension of recent new species designations
within the darter genus Percina: the "logperch" in the Coosa area is now
(since 1998?) considered to be Percina kathae rather than P. caprodes,
historically a more inclusive taxon. I had thought that kathae was only
north of the Tennessee. I'm still adapting to living in an area that has
more than two species of darter after my time living in low-biodiversity
Massachusetts(!).

--Bruce Stallsmith
Huntsville, AL, US of A

>All told, we caught or observed 20 species of fish:
>Longperch (Percina caprodes)
>Bronze darter (P. palmaris)
>Blackbanded darter (P. nigrofasciata)
>Greenbreast darter (Etheostoma jordani)
>Speckled darter (Eth. stigmaeum)
>Alabama shiner (Cyprinella callistia)
>Blue shiner (C. caerulea)
>Tricolor shiner (C. trichroistia)
>Largescale stoneroller (Campostoma oliogolepis)
>Southern studfish (Fundulus stellifer)
>Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides)
>Redeye bass (M. coosae)
>Bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus)
>Longear sunfish (L. megalotis)
>Redbreast sunfish (L. auritus)
>Alabama shad (Alosa alabamae)
>Golden redhorse (Moxostoma erythrurum)
>Freshwater drum (Aplodinotus grunniens)
>Longnose gar (Lepisosteus osseus)
>Channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)
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