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Darter Collecting Sites...


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#1 Guest_fishlvr_*

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Posted 06 November 2007 - 05:09 PM

Does anyone know of any rivers/creeks/etc. with darters near Fayetteville, GA(just south of Atlanta)?

#2 Guest_mzokan_*

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Posted 07 November 2007 - 07:59 PM

Your area is not really blessed with darter species -- the only two I know of are Blackbanded (Percina nigrofasciata) and Halloween darter (Percina sp.). Just check Google maps for some of the larger creeks near your place -- if there is good flow and a sandy-gravel bottom then you should find some blackbands. If you are willing to make a little bit of a trip, go down to where Flat Shoals Road crosses the Flint River just to the west of Concord -- just south of the bridge is a large rocky shoal area -- there should be some darters there and maybe some other cool stuff. Good Luck!

#3 Guest_fishlvr_*

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Posted 07 November 2007 - 09:08 PM

Your area is not really blessed with darter species -- the only two I know of are Blackbanded (Percina nigrofasciata) and Halloween darter (Percina sp.). Just check Google maps for some of the larger creeks near your place -- if there is good flow and a sandy-gravel bottom then you should find some blackbands. If you are willing to make a little bit of a trip, go down to where Flat Shoals Road crosses the Flint River just to the west of Concord -- just south of the bridge is a large rocky shoal area -- there should be some darters there and maybe some other cool stuff. Good Luck!


Thanks, I'll definitely be checking in to it.

#4 Guest_mzokan_*

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Posted 08 November 2007 - 04:20 PM

Just a quick note -- Halloween darters are protected in Georgia -- so I guess you can only keep the blackbandeds

http://georgiawildli...otectedfish.asp

#5 Guest_fishlvr_*

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Posted 08 November 2007 - 08:46 PM

Just a quick note -- Halloween darters are protected in Georgia -- so I guess you can only keep the blackbandeds

http://georgiawildli...otectedfish.asp


Thanks for that. I probably wouldn't have even thought to look on the endangered species list. :shock:

#6 Guest_daveneely_*

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Posted 08 November 2007 - 11:13 PM

Thanks for that. I probably wouldn't have even thought to look on the endangered species list. :shock:


Good luck telling them apart, though. Halloween darters aren't described yet, so they're not in any of the field guides that you're likely to have access to. Mary Freeman gave a talk a while back in which she discussed diagnostic characters; the only thing that I remember off the cuff is that in blackbandeds the saddles are narrower than the pale areas between them, while in halloweens they're wider (dramatically so). Male breeding color is different, also. It sounded like "halloween darters" from the Flint and Hooch were considerably different, too...

cheers,
Dave

#7 Guest_mzokan_*

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Posted 09 November 2007 - 08:53 AM

Good luck telling them apart, though. Halloween darters aren't described yet, so they're not in any of the field guides that you're likely to have access to. Mary Freeman gave a talk a while back in which she discussed diagnostic characters; the only thing that I remember off the cuff is that in blackbandeds the saddles are narrower than the pale areas between them, while in halloweens they're wider (dramatically so). Male breeding color is different, also. It sounded like "halloween darters" from the Flint and Hooch were considerably different, too...


I had read that Halloween daters looked very similar to bronze darters (P. palmaris), which should make colored up males easy to tell apart, but I don't know about the females and smaller males.

Dave, I had also read about that there is some talk of blackbandeds in the Hooch possibly being a different species, do you know anything about this?

#8 Guest_daveneely_*

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Posted 09 November 2007 - 12:58 PM

Dave, I had also read about that there is some talk of blackbandeds in the Hooch possibly being a different species, do you know anything about this?


They're definately different-looking than blackbandeds from adjacent drainages, but the same goes for every other major drainage system where they occur. If you go back and look at the tables in Crawford's (1956) study of meristic variation, it's prettty clear that something's going on that's more than just clinal or local variation...

There's also a couple folks out there with a lot of genetic data on those guys, but I don't know what the status of their work is.


------
Crawford, R. W. 1956. A study of the distribution and taxonomy of the percid fish Percina nigrofasciata (Agassiz). Tulane Stud.Zool. 4(1), 1-55.



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