Distributional Ecology of the Cisco (Coregonus Artedii) in Indiana'
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Distributional Ecology of the Cisco (Coregonus artedii) in Indiana' DAVID G. FREY Indiana University ABSTRACT The cisco is known with considerable certainty to occur in 41 lakes of northern Indiana, of which Shriner Lake at a latitude of 41° 14' N. is the southernmost known natural occurrence of the family Coregonidae. There are three and possibly more in- stances where lakes with cisco populations several decades ago no longer contain the species, presumably as a result of altered limnological conditions. The few recorded attempts at stocking the cisco in lakes in which they did not otherwise occur have apparently been quite uniformly unsuccessful, and it is concluded that the pre- Columbian distribution has not been extended by man's activities. The species generally occurs in the deep water of a lake in summer. As oxygen conditions become progressively more severe, the population is forced into the upper part of the hypolimnion, and finally into the lower or even the upper part of the thermocline. It is assumed in this paper that the species can tolerate water tempera- tures as high as 20° C., and an oxygen content as low as 3 ppm., or possibly even slightly • lower. As the species is forced progressively higher in the lake it comes into increas- ingly greater content with species of fish commonly occurring in the epilimnion, and may even be preyed upon by the bowfin and the northern pike. The summer bathymetric distribution of the species in several Indiana lakes was determined by means of gill nets, and in the other lakes it was inferred from the ex- tremes of temperature-oxygen stratification of summer. Data available for 37 cisco lakes as compared with 53 non-cisco lakes demonstrate that in general the cisco lakes have a thicker stratum of water with temperatures below 20° and an oxygen content greater than 3 ppm. The shallower cisco lakes tend to have an oxygen maximum in the thermocline, and in one lake such a photosynthetic maximum has occurred regularly over four successive summers. This type of oxygen distribution is believed significant in enabling the species to survive in small and shallow lakes. The facts that the cisco lakes in Indiana occur in definite clusters and that these lakes tend to have a different type of oxygen distribution than the non-cisco lakes point to the importance of regional geologic and geomorphic controls in the limnology of the lakes and consequently in the persistence of cisco populations in them. Contribution No. 585 from the Department of Zoology, Indiana University. The field studies reported on here were financed largely by the Indiana Department of Con- servation. The assistance of the following temporary employees of the Indiana Lake and Stream Survey is gratefully acknowledged: Edwin B. Davidoff, Christopher Davis, William R. Eberly, Allan E. Johnson, Harold R. McReynolds, George Naryshkin, Russell Noyes, Jr., William D. Ploughe, Thomas W. Pape, William H. Schleicher, Keith V. Slack, Tom A. Stombaugh, and Richard B. Williams. INVEST. INDIANA LAKES & STREAMS VOL. IV, No. 7. OCTOBER 1955. 177 178 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 178 Distribution of the cisco in Indiana ............................................................................................... 180 Indiana cisco chronology ............................................................................................................ 180 Additional records of ciscoes in Indiana ............................................................................ 183 Distribution of cisco lakes by major drainages ................................................................. 186 Artificial stocking of ciscoes 188 Factors governing the summer bathymetric distribution ...................................................... 191 Influence of age on oxygen-temperature requirements ........................................................ 196 Summer bathymetric distribution in Indiana lakes ............................................................... 198 A. Indian Village chain of lakes (Noble Co.) ................................................................... 199 ( A) 1. Indian Village Lake ...................................................................................................... 199 (A) 2. Hindman Lake ................................................................................................................ 201 (A) 3. Gordy Lake ....................................................................................................................... 201 (A) 4. Knapp Lake ....................................................................................................................... 201 5. Tippecanoe Lake (Kosciusko Co.) 202 6. Oliver Lake (LaGrange Co.) .................................................................................... 203 7. Myers Lake (Marshall Co.) ...................................................................................... 203 Comparison of temperature and oxygen stratification in lakes with and without ciscoes 207 Types of oxygen distribution in cisco and non-cisco lakes .................................................. 212 Constancy of oxygen typology during given summer .................................................... 212 Oliver Lake ............................................................................................................................. 212 Myers Lake ............................................................................................................................. 213 Little Tippecanoe Lake ...................................................................................................... 215 James Lake ............................................................................................................................. 217 Oxygen type-frequency distribution ...................................................................................... 217 Relation of oxygen typology to summer surfacing and mortality 221 Discussion and conclusions ................................................................................................................ 222 Literature cited ........................................................................................................................................ 225 INTRODUCTION The coregonid fishes, which are closely allied to the trouts and some- times are included in the same family with them, occur widely distributed in the lake districts of the northern portions of both North America and Eurasia. Except for its absence from Greenland, the group is continu- ously circum-boreal in distribution. The southernmost latitudinal limit of the natural distribution of the family is reached in the lake district of northern Indiana (Meek 1916:136) and in fact, the southernmost known natural occurrence of the family is in Shriner Lake in Whitley County, Indiana, at a latitude of 41° 14' N. The various types of coregonids are so plastic in their phenotypic expression that almost every lake has its own particular race, nation or subspecies of the species concerned. The most widely distributed coregonid in the glacial lakes of the northern United States and Canada is the cisco, Core gonus artedii Le Sueur. This species extends through the glaciated portion of the United States at least from New York to Minnesota, and in Canada it extends northward to Hudson Bay and environs (Dymond 1933) and northwestward into the Yukon and Northwest Territories (Dymond 1943). This is a pelagic, plankton-feeding species with a terminal mouth, 179 belonging to the subgenus Argyrosomus of the European terminology. Like the other members of the genus it has been considered to be a cold stenotherm requiring a fairly high level of dissolved oxygen, although its oxygen requirement is apparently less demanding than in the whitefishes. The present study, however, demonstrates that local cisco populations can be much more tolerant of high temperatures and low concentrations of oxygen than is commonly assumed. The phenotypic plasticity of the cisco is demonstrated by the fact that Koelz (1931) recognized 24 groups (subspecies) within this one species, although Hile (1936b and 1937) later concluded that there was insuf- ficient basis for establishing these infra-species categories. Moreover, as Hile pointed out, there is a considerable environmental control of pheno- typic expression, so that, for example, different year classes within a single body of water are able to differ significantly from one another in various morphometric characters. The present study is concerned particularly with the distribution of the cisco, and the factors controlling its distribution. If we assume for North America, as Thienemann (1950) has done for several of the core- gonids in northern Europe, that in late-glacial, or at least by early post- glacial, time all the glacial lakes (including ice-block basins without out- lets?) in the appropriate watersheds contained ciscoes, then the absence of the cisco from particular lakes must have resulted from the develop- ment of conditions unsuitable for the continued survival of the species. Thienemann (1918) concluded for Coregonus maraena in northern Ger- many that the species was eliminated from certain of these lakes as the oxygen content of the hypolimnion declined to certain minimum values, accompanying the natural typological aging