METHODS

COLLECTION METHODS

Monthly sampling is conducted using standardized methods as described by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, FMRI Fisheries Independent Monitoring Program. For this project, fish collections are made monthly at 28 sites throughout the county using a 70 foot center-bag seine net and a 20 foot shrimp trawl net. Fishes collected are identified to species, enumerated, measured, and released. Overall, this helps establish a detailed dataset on such topics as species presence/absence, habitat preference, and seasonal trends in species abundance. Using small-mesh size (1/8 inch) nets, our efforts focused on juvenile fish abundances, giving us the opportunity to look at juvenile fish recruitment and annual indices of abundance.

Between January 1993 and December 1996, a total of 2,432 trawl and 2,389 seine collections were made.

In waters deeper than 1.8 m, a 6.1 m (20 foot) otter trawl was towed at 1300 rpm for five minutes (avg. distance= 0.10 nautical miles)

A 21 m center-bag seine with 3.2 mm (1/4 inch) mesh was used along shorelines in water shallower than 1.5 m. Gently sloping shorelines were sampled with a beach seine by manually dragging the seine 9.1 m (30 feet) perpendicular to the shore. Boat seines were deployed from the stern of the boat in an arc along steeply banked shorelines

A splitter box is used to
subsample large large collections.

Fish are identified, enumerated and standard lengths measured to the nearest millimeter. A maximum of twenty length-measurements were recorded on most species, and up to

100 measurements on economically important species.