Missouri Minnows

As I'm sure some of you have noticed, I've been struggling with my minnow IDs lately.

I got tired of flipping through my books trying to see/remember which fish had which anal fin ray counts, lateral line scale counts, etc., so I created a wiki to let me just click through and (hopefully) rapidly narrow down my ID choices to a smaller subset of species. At the very least, it started to familiarize myself with Missouri's species.

In case anyone else might find it useful, here's the link: http://mominnows.wikispaces.com/

I thought about adding which drainages each species could be found in, but then I discovered that the MDC sites for each fish lists the counties they're known from....and that was good enough for me!

So far, I've only tried it out on two species I caught last night that I was pretty sure of from the start (Sand and Red Shiners)....and I got to them with this flow chart! I was pretty relieved!

If in doubt, use a dichotomous key, no doubt about it.