Justin from MA and Josh from NH joined me for some native collecting in Eastern NY today. We all had a great time and added to Justins species total from last Saturday. We had our own fishy version of Henny Youngman as Josh kept the fishy one liners coming on the drives between sites. I don't want to share any now as I'm hoping he'll have a stand up routine on Youtube soon. We made a return to our Schoharie creek site and went up a small trib to get a male fantail darter which we could not find last week and this week only found one and about 30 females each fat with eggs. I can't remember ever having this much trouble finding male fantails but with all the fat females the males must be due soon. We tried some slack water areas not sampled last week and found hundreds of rosyface shiners, bluntnose minnows, young central stonerollers and a few spotfin shiners as well as small pumpkinseed sunnies. A few riffle samples confirmed the same riffle species found last week. We then headed to a return to Fox creek to further investigate the Rainbow darter situation and quickly found 15 more rainbow darters; male, female and a couple small juveniles over a few sets of riffles. We also found some nice central stonerollers and a few Banded killies. The biggest male had a beautfull blue sheen over dark bars, actually the little 1 inch male had the same. In another small backwater we trapped some 3-4 inch minnows which we could not identify, looked like brassy minnows but I don't think they are located here. We then headed to East Berne for lunch and ice cream. Then to the stream to show Josh some redside dace. we also added some species to Justin's list here as we found some Northern Hog suckers, Some giant Brook Sticklebacks, more Pumpkinseeds. Also found some beautiful creek chubs fully colored up as well as everything found last week.
Also just for fun the first person that can correctly guess from the following description one of the new species we seined up this trip will get four redside dace for the cost of shipping.
Here's the clues simply reply with your answer:
1. oval body shape
2. solid dark almost black/brown color
3. use sticks to make "nest"
4. prefers slower silty pools
5. round tail also dark color
6. has some serious looking teeth
7. size roughly three
8. sometimes uses tail slapping at surface similar to southern killiefish as a warning
9. actually has scales on their tail
Edited by keepnatives, 17 May 2009 - 12:05 AM.