Standard Methods for Sampling North American Freshwater Fishes, second edition

Chapter 13: Cenotes

Xavier Chiappa-Carrara, María Eugenia Vega-Cendejas, Juan J. Schmitter-Soto, David A. Espinosa Mendoza, Efraín M. Chávez Solís, and Daniel Arceo Carranza

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874769.ch13

The first edition of Standard Methods for Sampling North American Freshwater Fishes (Bonar et al. 2009) did not include a chapter specifically addressing sampling in cenotes or collapsed sinkholes that form in exokarstic surfaces, such as the Yucatan Peninsula. Here, we recommend methods for sampling freshwater and brackish-water fishes in cenotes and discuss opportunities and challenges inherent in sampling these diverse environments.

The term “cenote” (from the Mayan ts’ono’ot: “hole with water”) refers to various types of water bodies in cavities formed in karstic rocks comprising large areas of the plains of the Yucatan Peninsula. These cavities are formed by several erosion processes that gradually wear away limestone. These habitats are important because below the surface, hundreds of kilometers of galleries house underground water courses that connect the freshwater karstic aquifer with the salty waters of the sea, generating complex interfaces between both types of water of different salinity and density. Cenotes have specific hydrological, geological, and biological characteristics that allow the coexistence of very particular fish communities. Hall (1936) stated that Yucatecans usually distinguish aguadas, or shallow waterholes, and flooded caves from cenotes, but the three types grade into one another. We will use the term “cenote” generally to include all karstic, limited (i.e., completely encircled by land), inland, freshwater or brackish-water bodies, or sinkholes. The distribution of cenotes is limited to a few places in the world; southeastern Mexico has a large number of cenotes (~7,000-8,000; Lamas-Cosío et al. 2021). Karstic sinkholes, nevertheless, are also present in Australia, Cuba, Florida, Turkey, and the Dinaric and Ural regions (Szeroczy?ska and Zawisza 2015), among other places.