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 An adult mottled sculpin, about 80mm total length. Sculpin are the dominant fish, in numbers and mass, in many Southern Appalachian streams. What I do I'm interested in finding out how much stream fish move, and what causes them to move when they choose to do so. As odd as it sounds, the idea that stream fish choose to make long moves (>50 m) is a controversial one, and data to address this topic are scarce. So our ideas about long moves come primarily from small-scale studies, a less-than-ideal approach. My project is designed to more directly study long moves. I'm using mark-recapture and genetic data to document long moves in mottled sculpin, a fish thought to be especially sedentary. I've been conducting surveys of sculpin movement over four 200m stretches of the Nantahala River and its tributaries (on USFS land) for the past two years. These surveys have shown the expected tendency for sculpin to move to areas with high food abundance, but also an unexpected, (statistically) independent tendency to move toward areas with high sculpin density. This summer I plan to manipulate sculpin densities and food availability in my study areas to determine whether the correlations from my surveys have a causal basis. |
