Standard Methods for Sampling North American Freshwater Fishes, second edition

Chapter 6: Coldwater Fish in Small Standing Waters

Cindy Chu, Beth Holbrook, Steve Sandstrom, and Mark Poesch

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874769.ch6

This chapter describes standard techniques for sampling coldwater fish in small standing waters. Benthic and suspended pelagic gill netting were described as standardized approaches in the first edition of this book (Lester et al. 2009). In this second edition, the benthic gill netting standard has not changed but was renamed “horizontal gill netting” to better match other chapters. The suspended-pelagic-netting protocol has been removed. Hydroacoustic-sampling and vertical gill netting protocols have been added. These latter methods have been added because they are effective at sampling the pelagic zone of small standing waters, where many coldwater species reside during the ice-free season, and they have been adopted in different jurisdictions across North America.

Within the context of this book, coldwater fish species are those that prefer water temperatures less than 15°C, and small standing waters are lakes or reservoirs where surface area is equal to or less than 200 ha. Chapter 7 of this book describes sampling coldwater fishes in large standing waters (i.e., surface area >200 ha). Two chapters are dedicated to sampling coldwater fishes in standing waters because lake size varies by several orders of magnitude in North America and some differences in sampling methods are needed to efficiently sample at both ends of the lake-size continuum. Although it is clear that some differences in methods are necessary to accommodate lake size, it is not clear when the transition from methods for small to large standing waters should apply. To bridge this gap, the horizontal gill netting and hydroacoustic sampling methods are compatible between the small (Chapter 6) and large (Chapter 7) cold standing waters, with this chapter emphasizing the sampling design and intensity for small standing waters.