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Fish Reports

2007 Report

Open River, Upper Mississippi River 2007 Fish Collection Summary

This report is a bullet summary of the Long Term Resource Monitoring Program's (LTRMP) fish collection efforts conducted by the Open River Field Station for Open River of the Upper Mississippi River in 2007.

• 159 fish collections were conducted using five gear types (Table 2.5). Of the 159 collections, 132 were from randomly selected sites. Twenty collections were from tributary fixed sites and 10 were from main channel border, unstructured fixed sites.
  
  
• Side channel border; main channel border, unstructured; and main channel border wing dam strata received the most sampling effort.  Tributary strata received the least amount of sampling effort (Table 2.5).

• The 2007 spring water rise typical—reaching just above flood stage for a brief period in April and dropping off slowly through June.  The river neared flood stage for a brief period in early September then quickly dropped back to pre-event levels.  This event was followed by a similar event of slightly less magnitude in October.  These late events left two samples incompleted in the second period and five samples incompleted in the third period (Table 2.5).
  
  
• 3,551 fish were collected representing 52 species (Table 3.5).
  
  
• Historically, 129 fish species have been collected from the Open River (Pitlo et al. 1995).
  
  
• The LTRMP species total for Open River before the 2007 season was 106. No new species were collected in 2007.
  
  
• Species caught that are Missouri-listed species of special concern included:  flier (1), mooneye (1), pugnose minnow (3), paddlefish (1) and blue sucker (10) (Table 3.5).
  
  
• Three species of Asian carp were caught and included grass carp (2), bighead carp (5), and silver carp (217) (Table 3.5).   These are exotic fish species that have been accidentally released into the Mississippi River system.
  
  
• Mean catch-per-unit-effort and standard error for stratified random and fixed-site sampling for each stratum are shown in the Open River tables. Length distributions for selected species of fish are shown in  Figures 1 to 17.

Content manager: Jennie Sauer