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We made a few small trips the second half of the year. Indiana Rivers have so many interesting species. Mark Binkley and I went to the Maumee River just East of Fort Wayne. One of the more unusual species we found was the Eastern Sand Darter. The first one was next to a muddy bank, so we tried out in the main stream on a sandy gravel bar, and got some more. Interestingly the Distribution of Native U.S. Fishes by Watershed link says that they are only Historical in the Upper Maumee River. We
also hit the Tippecanoe River in the same places NANFA sampled in 2004
and found many of the same fishes. It’s interesting that Nature Serve
again did not even have Pirate Perch listed but we saw them and also
Gilt Darters, an endangered fish in Indiana. We then went to Moots
Creek northeast of Lafayette where we found an abundance of minnows,
dace, chubs, and darters. From there we stopped at Burnett Creek by
West Lafayette where we found lots of darters with Orangethroat Darters
being the most numerous (over 80 in about an hour). With
my daughter and two of her friends we tried Wolf Creek and some of the
drainage ditches in northwest Indiana a few times. Here we found lots
of Northern Longear Sunfish, and a number of different minnows,
topminnows, shiners, sunfish, bass, carp & bowfin. |