Arkansas Researchers: Length Of Drought Affects Survival Of Fish In Stream Pools

January 17, 2008

Release from: Linda Young
AHN

Little Rock, AR - Researchers at the University of Arkansas say that the length of time a drought lasts influences whether fish can survive in a pool of water.

Scientists discovered that not all pools of water are equal from one year to the next in how well they can house a fish species during a drought year.

Those findings will become increasingly important when droughts are either unusual or prolonged, they say.

Findings from the study are published in the journal Ecology of Freshwater Fish, published by Blackwell Press.

Dan Magoulick, associate professor of biological sciences in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and graduate student Matt P. Dekar were lead authors of the study.

"Drying in one year is not necessarily the same as drying in another year," Magoulick said in a press statement released Wednesday.

It turns out that streams that dry up regularly in the summer turn have not been well studied because they are fairly rare, especially in the United States. The team studied streams in the Ozark and Boston Mountains region of the central United States.

"We found that certain abiotic factors, such as pool depth and total volume, are important to the fish and the species diversity and density in the system," Magoulick said. "However, what happens one year isn't necessarily going to happen the next year."

They plan to assemble models of stream drying next to see if they can predict what happens under different climate conditions.