Lab #12
Date: 4/20/16
Location: Lumber River Park "The Wire"
Lab Activity: Collecting fish with nets in the Lumber River
Habitat: Freshwater River
Temperature: 78 F
Wind: Not Recorded
Humidity: 100% (It's a river)
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Yellow Perch (Perca flavescens)
The Yellow Perch is able to reach lengths of up to 15 inches and can be recognized by the thick vertical stripe pattern that goes across their body in addition yellowish color.
Yellow Perch can be found in all sorts of freshwater habitats such as rivers, lakes and ponds.
This species starts out eating zooplankton and algae, as they grow older their diet shifts to other fish, insects and just about any creature that will fit in its mouth.
Ducky Shiner (Notropis cummingsae)
The Dusky Shiner is a member of the family Cyprinidae, the carp family, they are easily recognized by their relative short length along with the dark colored stripe which runs horizontally down the length of its body.
The Dusky prefers to live in slow moving backwaters with plenty of detritus and vegetation.
When I tried looking up information on this species, I struggled to find much of anything; according to one source that I managed to find not much is known about this fish.
Largemouth Bass (Micropterus salmoides)
You can find largemouth bass nearly anywhere in the eastern half of the United States and you can recognize them by their horizontal stripe, their spiny dorsal fin and of course their relatively large mouths.
The Largemouth also has large eyes and this is because they are visual predators and are often one of the top predator in their habitat. When they are young they eat primarily zooplankton but as they age their diet shifts to larger invertebrates and other species of fish.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Lab #11
Date: 4/13/16
Location: Lumber River Conservancy
Lab Activity: Checking Turtle Traps and more Radio Tracking
Habitat: Freshwater Pond
Temperature: 69.5 F
Wind: 1.7 mph
Humidity: 45.5%
Hooped turtle traps were set up and baited the day before and left out all night. There were several traps but only one them had turtles.
We also tracked another Eastern Box Turtle, please refer to the entry to Lab #9 for more information on how that is done.
Box Turtle #050
Y-3864818
X-0650505
No measurements were taken.
Another Box Turtle was found dead that had been captured previously. By looking at its notches we were able to determine that its three letter code was "MNO".
Because many zoologists use capture and recapture techniques in order to determine population sizes of animals they need a way to determine if the turtle in their trap is an individual that they have seen before or if it is new. In the case of the Lumber River Conservancy they mark the turtles by putting notches in its shell, where each notch represents a number. The notches that are on the anterior end of the carapace represent whole number while the posteriorly located notches represent decimals.
#050 a particularly colorful male
MNO not so colorful (Gender unknown to me)
Hooped Turtle Trap
Yellow-bellied Slider (Trachemys scripta)
We caught two of this species in same trap one was a normal colored smaller male while the other was a melanistic rather aggressive and larger male.
The melanistic individual, note that the yellowish markings are still present but are darker in coloration.
The smaller out of the the two turtles was one that had been recaptured and we determined that his code was 0.17 and the melanistic turtle had notches placed on him and was given the code 6.90.
Yellow-bellied 0.17
Plastron: 134.3 mmCarapace: 151.6 mm
Weight: 542 grams
Yellow-bellied 6.90
Pastron: 155.6 mm
Carapace: 170.5 mm
Weight: 740 grams
The Yellow-bellied tends to live to no longer than 30 years of age. When these turtles first hatch they are mostly carnivorous but as they age their diet shifts to favoring plant material, although they are omnivorous throughout their lives and will spend most of their time in the water only coming out to back in the sun's heat.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)