Banded Darters in the Flint River, Alabama

I've started a new field project with a graduate student that involves looking at darter habitat partitioning in riffles, inspired by Todd Crail's work in Ohio and Kentucky. We did our first collections in the Flint River in Madison County, Alabama, yesterday, and confirmed what my student Brian told me he'd seen before - there are banded darters, lots of them, in the Flint in the riffle system we were working. Probably 30 of the 74 darters we netted were bandeds, the most common species ahead of black snubnoses. North Alabama is the far southern edge of the range. My question is this: Scott Mettee's Alabama fishes book says that they collected bandeds in the Paint Rock and Elk Rivers, and Shoal Creek and Cypress Creek systems, but does the Boschung/Mayden book report the species in the Flint? I had a copy of the book and it seems to have gone missing... Anyway, I'd appreciate any input on previously reported range. Thanks.

Bruce,

It does not show them in the Flint River drainage. I second the fact they are highly abundant in the Paint Rock, and given their presence in further west TN tributary drainages it seems odd they wouldn't be there. Any more details about the study? Looking at food resources by chance?

Thanks Matt, I owe you a library favor... What we're doing is relating habitat use by species broken down into males, females and juveniles, with the measured habitat being substrate composition, water flow and depth. We're doing this at two sites, one on the main stem of the Flint where there's a large riffle section that's loaded with bandeds, and the other site at upper Estill Fork of the Paint Rock. At the Estill Fork site a student has just finished a year's worth of drift net sampling and is doing the last round of ID's on the inverts we've found, along with some kicknetting sampling. So we have a good idea of what's in the water. The Flint is a new site for us. It's much closer to Huntsville, and some readers will know this site as where we went on the last day of the Huntsville NANFA convention in 2003. But I haven't been back too much, so it's almost new to me. One interesting difference is that snubnose darters are very common at both sites, but all of the ones we found in the Flint were blacks, and over 90% of the ones we've found at Estill Fork are tennessees (the small remainder seem to be blacks). This is consistent with the observation that blacks are more common in streams with a direct connection to the Tennessee, like the Flint, and tennessees are more common in lower order streams in the hills, like Estill Fork. It's a fun project so far, I keep calling it real biology.

Well that should definately give you a great idea of food availability. I was more curious because that seems to be a component largely avoided by resource use studies (well and tying in issues of mark/recapture, same fish w/ multiple observations over time). Heck I am terribly guilty of the food issue myself. A committee member suggested I quantify snail densities in areas of use and availability or at least come up with some reliable regerssion estimator and while incredibly cool (and probably very ecological relavent) I ran away from it like a house on fire. I sort of regret it, but it saved me probably a month of lab work, additional field days, and ultimately money I probably didn't have...definately sounds like a fun project you have going.

Nice to have obviously dimorphic adults for most of the year to segregate out sexes. I might suggest some measure of substrate roughness and/or heterogeneity. Both can be readily measuered with minimal time added to the composition measurement. Also a measure of cross-sectional discharge on the day of sampling if you don't have gauge data readily available. I don't know why more resource studies aren't hammered for this, because all the flow data is really only good for that species in that stream.

Yes, the cross-sectional discharge is a key variable we can quantify. I have a flow meter that we use to read current at 5 cm from the bottom, and we measure flow and depth at one meter intervals on a shore-to-shore transect. This allows for an accurate calculation of total stream discharge, and we can do local polygons from the cross-sections our data create. I'd like to run our drift nets at the Flint too, once I find a student(s) willing to do it. The Flint is being pushed in a eutrophic direction by the rapid expansion of subdivisions in its drainage; this riffle system has the aquatic plants like Podostemum and mosses that banded darters prefer but also more algae than should be there.