There's something I'd like to ask all of you catfish aficionados... Based on your experience and observations, how much would you say that madtoms and bullheads move around in a fluvial system? Do you think it's possible that they would move a couple of hundred meters to locate a suitable spawning site? I haven't been able to find much info out there on this topic.

Pat and J.R. at Conservation Fisheries have found some substantial dispersal of madtoms in streams from reintroduction and recruitment of reintroduced individuals. Off the top of my head I can't think of any studies that may have marked madtom movements. There was some hypotheses tossed around at meetings in the past years that chucky madtoms may have been persisting in the much larger Nolichucky River in very low numbers but moving upstream, possibly for spawning, in the much smaller Chucky Creek, totally speculative though. A couple hundred meters in a fluvial system doesn't seem that much of a movement to me for a bullhead.

Similar speculation is in Fishes of Ohio where M. B. Trautman talks about the scioto madtom which was only ever found in one riffle of one stream (Big Darby Creek a tributary of the Scioto River). He sugested that is was likely, because they were always found at the same time of year, that they migrated seasonally from the much larger Scioto River. This again is speculation because none were ever found in the Scioto. It is similarly mentioned and been repeated by others since Trautman's time that the Northern Madtom population of Big Darby may do the same thing since much larger numbers are collected anually when investigations are made during late fall in November.

Thanks for the info -- I will be sure to check out these resources. Some methodological aspects of the field work for my master's thesis depend upon whether or not these fish move around, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to find much info on madtom behavior. Anyway, thanks for the leads!