Christopher Butler

Christopher Butler

May 06, 2016

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Some preliminary results for April

Hi Everyone,

In anticipation of meeting our goal, we decided to get a head start on sampling. We are still working hard to attract more backers but wanted to share some interesting and promising preliminary results.

With the month of April nearing an end, we took advantage of an excellent weather window on the night of the 28-29

th
. Our efforts netted us a total of 11 spotted seatrout from a five sampling time points.Compared to daytime stomach samples, seatrout sampled at night showed an increase in the consumption of shrimp. By weight, stomach contents from spotted seatrout captured at night consisted of 82.5% fish and 17.5% shrimp.In contrast, the stomachs contents from 42 spotted seatrout obtained during April from mid-morning through the early afternoon samples were composed of 94.0% fish with only 6% shrimp.Perhaps the most interesting result between these two sampling efforts is the increase of identifiable shrimp between from nighttime samples compared to those collected during the day.Of the daytime samples, we were unable to identify any shrimp down to species, and a large portion (33.5%) of shrimp prey could not be classified beyond “unidentified shrimp remains”.This is in contrast to our nighttime samples where the brown shrimp, Farfantepenaeus aztecus, comprised 87.9% of our shrimp prey; unidentified shrimp remains only contributed 0.02% of nighttime shrimp remains.

Although these results are very preliminary, We believe that there is a lot we will be able to do with this data.We are off to a good start, but we still need your help to spread the word about our project so we can reach our goal by next Tuesday! These nighttime samples will shed some much-needed light on interesting predator-prey interactions within Mississippi waters. Thank you once again for choosing to support our project and please stay tuned as we are now in a new month and hope to sample again soon!

Best regards,

Chris and Justin

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About This Project

Center for Fisheries Research and Development, The University of Southern Mississippi

Spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus) is the most popular recreational species along the coast of Mississippi. Although we have a general understanding about the prey species spotted seatrout eat, stomach contents of fish collected during the day are often too digested to identify beyond broad categories like fish or shrimp. We will sample spotted seatrout from the late evening to early morning, a time believed to be their most active feeding period.

Blast off!

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