Chapter 3. Protocol for Monitoring Birds in Panama Forests
5. Estimated Budget and Timing for Panama
Every individual fish should be identified to species, so that a list of fish species present at that site can be made. After identification and recording, a photograph of each species should be taken, for vouchering purposes. Any species that is difficult to identify, unexpected at that site (excluding protected species), or cannot be identified in the field should be euthanized in a 100-mg/L solution of buffered tricaine methanesulfonate (sold as “Finquel” by Argent Chemical Laboratories, Inc. of Redmond, Washington), vouchered in a 10% solution of buffered formalin, and later transferred to a 70% solution of ethanol for storage, safe handling, and positive identification. All other individuals should be returned alive to the stream, re-distributed evenly throughout the site.
4. Personnel Training
We recommend that at least one member of each sampling crew participate in a professional course on electrofishing. Such courses are offered by the American Fisheries Society (www.fisheries.org), United States Fish and Wildlife Service (http://nctc.fws.gov/), and Smith-Root (Vancouver, Washington; http://www.smith-root.com/services/training). This crew member should then train all other members of the crew.
5. Estimated Budget and Timing for Panama
Time needed to complete surveys
In our experience, the standardized protocol described above should take a trained sampling crew approximately four hours per site to complete on average, including site demarcation, fish sampling, fish processing, and simple habitat and water-quality data collection. This estimate is based on our 50+ years of combined experience sampling fishes in first- through fifth-order streams. However, the exact time needed to survey a given site will vary depending on site width and length, crew size, and fish density, among other factors.
For electrofishing we recommend a battery-powered or gasoline-generator-powered DC backpack electrofisher, equipped with a 2 m-long fiberglass anode pole with a round anode and safety switch and a 2 m-long braided steel cathode (“rattail”). Fishes should be captured in dip-nets with 6.4- mm mesh and 2 m-long wooden or fiberglass handles.
Each backpack electrofisher requires two to three people to operate; one person wears the backpack and carries a dip net, while an additional one to two people carry dip nets and buckets in which to deposit captured fish. This setup costs approximately USD $10,000 per electrofisher (including the electrofisher, electrodes, battery, charger, and nets). The number of electrofishers necessary to effectively sample a site depends on stream size; in a wide stream, fishes easily evade a single electrofisher by swimming outside of the electrical field. Rabeni et al. (2009) recommended one backpack electrofisher and two to three personnel for every 4 m of stream width. Thus, in a stream 16 m wide, four backpack electrofishers and eight to twelve personnel are needed. For seining, we recommend a 3-4 m-long by 2 m-tall flat seine (no bag), with 6.5 mm mesh, floats on the top line, and lead weights on the bottom line spaced at 15 cm intervals. The seine can be attached to any type of braile (pole) that is long enough and sturdy enough to pull the net. This setup costs approximately USD
$150 per seine. Up to two seines can be operated simultaneously (in wide streams), each operated by three people. The site endpoints should be delineated by flagging tape, and if block nets are to be used, these should be put in place.
6. Data Output
Recommended standard fish metrics
Investigators should extract a set of standard metrics from the field fish data and present metric values in tables of reports and publications (See Figures 4.4- 4.6 for some examples of databases). From these standard metrics, a variety of additional metrics could be derived post hoc by the investigator, or by other investigators. Each metric should be presented separately for each gear type (electrofishing versus seining) at each site. In other words, if 30 sites are sampled, 60 values should be presented for each metric. Standard metrics include the following:
A list of all fish species captured
The number of fish species captured (i.e., species richness)
The total number of individuals of each species that were captured (i.e., catch)
The PA of each species based on electrofishing, calculated as catch divided by the length of the site (fish km-1)
The PA of each species based on electrofishing, calculated as the catch divided by the area (length times mean width) of the site (fish ha-1)
The CPUE of each species based on seining, calculated as catch divided by the number of seine hauls made (fish haul-1).
Recommended environmental data collection
sites. At a minimum, we recommend that investigators record the following types of supplementary data at each site during each visit:
Latitude, longitude, and elevation (m) of the upstream and downstream site endpoints, and the geodetic datum upon which these coordinates are based
Site length (m) and mean width (m)
Water temperature (°C), pH, conductivity (μs cm-1), and turbidity (NTU)
Electrofisher settings that were used (voltage, frequency, and duty cycle) and the number of seine hauls that were made
Descriptive notes about sampling conditions, habitat characteristics, the presence of unusual features such as man-made barriers or pollutant discharges, and other noteworthy biological observations such as spawning activity, the presence of sores or deformities in fish, or the presence of dead fish.
Depending on study objectives and available resources, it also may be prudent to collect additional data on stream discharge (m3 s-1), water quality (e.g., dissolved oxygen [mg L-1], metal concentrations), instream habitat (e.g., substrate size, embeddedness, woody debris), or riparian condition (e.g., extent and type of vegetation). If habitat measurements are to be collected, we recommend use of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Rapid Bioassessment Protocol” for physical habitat measurement in high-gradient streams (see Chapter 5 and Appendix A in Barbour et al.
1999; available at http://water.epa.gov/scitech/monitoring/rsl/bioassessment/).
Figure 4.4. An example of a database on a fish community.
Figure 4.5. An example of a database on site characteristics.
Figure 4.6. An example of a database on focal fish species.