Re: NANFA-- fish distributions

geoff (gkimber2_at_alltel.net)
08 Oct 2003 20:07:16 -0400

Awesome.

Geoff Kimber
Lexington,KY

On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 17:48, Dave Neely wrote:
> A while back there was a thread on what native fish taxa had the largest
> distribution in North America. Well, I couldn't get this one out of my
> skull, so I started playing around on my free time... and happened to
> re-read the opening chapter of Hocutt and Wiley (1986), Ichthyofaunal
> Patterns on a Geographic Grid, and it hit me...
>
> I started poking around and found a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection
> of North America with river basins on it . This projection is scaled so it
> should portray areas as equivalent across the map. I overlaid a grid scaled
> at approximately 100km on each side (so each cell has a total area of
> roughly 10,000 km2) onto the map, made a whole bunch of photocopies, and
> then reconstructed ranges of several of the candidates for "most broadly
> distributed" onto these maps, leaving out introduced populations. I
> generally used ranges as depicted in Lee et al. (1980) and Scott and
> Crossman (1973), although where I knew of additional range extensions, I
> included these as well. For taxa with ranges extending into Eurasia, I did
> not include the Eurasian portion in the estimate.
>
> Grids were scored for presence/absence, and the number of grids occupied
> summed to give a very rough , first-order approximation of range size, in
> km2 (and no, I'm not even going to try and derive an error measurement!)
>
> Drum roll, please...
>
> The winner is...
>
> Esox lucius, range 11,130,000 km2.
>
> Close runners-up were Lota lota, 10,560,000 km2 and Catostomus catostomus,
> 10,410,000 km2.
>
> Other widely-distributed fishes weren't even in the same ballpark.
> Rhinichthys cataractae 811,000 km2
> Semotilus atromaculatus 513,000 km2
> Aplodinotus grunniens, 440,000 km2
>
> As a frame of reference, the total land area of Canada, Mexico, and the US
> is approximately 21,600,000 km2.
>
> Hope this satisfies the curiosity of the rest of you folks who lost sleep
> over this...
>
> cheers,
> Dave
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