TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PATTERNS OF FISH DISTRIBUTION AND DIVERSITY IN THE NOXUBEE RIVER, MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA By Michael Thomas Calloway A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Mississippi State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Biological Sciences in the Department of Biological Sciences Mississippi State, Mississippi August 2010 TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PATTERNS OF FISH DISTRIBUTION AND DIVERSITY IN THE NOXUBEE RIVER, MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA By Michael Thomas Calloway Approved: _________________________________ _________________________________ Gary N. Ervin Christopher M. Taylor Associate Professor of Biological Associate Professor of Natural Sciences Resources Management Mississippi State University Texas Tech University (Director of Thesis and Graduate (Committee Member) Coordinator of the Department of Biological Sciences) _________________________________ _________________________________ Todd Tietjen Gary L. Myers Limnologist Dean of the College of Arts and Southern Nevada Water Authority Sciences (Committee Member) Mississippi State University Name: Michael Thomas Calloway Date of Degree: August 7, 2010 Institution: Mississippi State University Major Field: Biological Sciences Major Professor: Dr. Gary Ervin Title of Study: TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PATTERNS OF FISH DISTRIBUTION AND DIVERSITY IN THE NOXUBEE RIVER, MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA Pages in Study: 69 Candidate for Degree of Master of Science The Mobile Basin is a prime example of a system that has undergone extensive channel modification with corresponding declines in the distribution and abundance of the native aquatic fauna. However, many of the declining aquatic species of the Mobile basin may persist within unmodified subbasins. The Noxubee River is a subbasin of the Mobile basin that has had very little alteration throughout its watershed. I investigated the species richness and assemblage structure to determine if the contemporary fish assemblage attributes resembled the conditions represented by historic collections. The findings of this study are important because the Noxubee River has not been extensively investigated since 1983, and the river could serve as refugia for declining riverine species of the Mobile basin. After examination at both local and regional levels, I determined that a diverse contemporary fish assemblage comprising 87 species, similar to historic collections, still persists in the Noxubee River system. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee for all of their support during my time at Mississippi State University. I would especially like to thank Dr. Christopher Taylor for his guidance and patience as my thesis advisor. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr. Gary Ervin for his support and guidance. Dr. Todd Tietjen and Dr. Ronald Altig provided me with valuable editing and commentary for which I am eternally grateful. Dr. Todd Slack of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science provided invaluable services in the acquisition of historical data and the identification of certain species. I would like to thank all of the faculty and staff of the Mississippi State University Biological Sciences Department for their help through the years. I would like to thank the NSF REU program without which the dataset for this study would not exist. Dr. Matthew Roberts and Daniel Millican deserve special recognition for their assistance in field collection, identification, and instruction on the use of different software packages. James Hendrix was invaluable during data collection. James spent many days in the field with me collecting fishes. Dr. Jacob Walker provided assistance in the use of ArcGis to obtain land cover percentage data and in the collection of fishes. Beau Newsome, Brandon Geisbrecht, Brad Permenter, and Ward McGee helped in the collection of fishes and in obtaining access permission to collect on private lands. I would like to thank David Richardson for granting me access to all Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge lands. I would like to thank the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science and University of Alabama Ichthyological Collection for historical collection data. The Mississippi ii Museum of Natural Science staff, the Alabama Game and Fish Commission staff, the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge staff, and the Tombigbee National Forest staff were all generous in providing permits for collection of my data set. I would like to express my gratitude to Patricia Calloway, Rebecca Blair, and Cathi Blair for their help with editing. The MSU-IACUC provided approval for this project #06-036. And last, but not least, I would like to thank the numerous landowners who provided me access to their lands for collecting purposes. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii LIST OF TABLES ...............................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................1 II. MATERIALS AND METHODS .......................................................................5 Study System .....................................................................................................5 Data Collection ..................................................................................................6 Historical Data ...................................................................................................8 Species Richness Comparisons ........................................................................10 Pre- and Post- TTW Assemblage Structure .....................................................11 Environmental Gradients and Contemporary Assemblage Structure ..............12 III. RESULTS ........................................................................................................14 Comparison of Species Richnes.......................................................................14 Pre- and Post- TTW Assemblage Comparison ................................................15 Environmental Gradients and Contemporary Community Structure...............18 IV. DISCUSSION ..................................................................................................22 LITERATURE CITED ......................................................................................................31 APPENDIX A CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION ..............................................................37 B SPECIES ABUNDANCES OF HISTORICAL COLLECTION .....................58 C ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLES MEASURED FROM EACH SITE DURING 2006............................................................................65 iv LIST OF TABLES TABLE Page 1 Pearson correlations of fish species for axis 2 and axis 3 of the NMS ordination comparing assemblage structure of historical and contemporary data sets are presented in the table. Strongly correlated values ≥0.5 are shown in red. The correlations did not demonstrate any separate grouping in ordination space of historical and contemporary collection sites. .........................................18 2 Pearson correlations of measured environmental variables with NMS axes of the analysis of environmental gradients and contemporary community structure are shown in the table, with correlations ≥0.50 are shown in red to indicate the strongest detected assemblage-environment associations. ....................................21 3 Pearson correlations of fish species with NMS axis 2 and NMS axis 3 from the analysis of environmental gradients and contemporary community structure are shown in the table. Values ≥0.5 are shown in red. The correlations indicate groupings of fish species according to their habitat preferences described in Ross (2001)............21 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE Page 1 The map demonstrates the orientation of the Noxubee River Drainage, and the symbols mark collection sites from the summer of 2006. Closed triangles represent contemporary collection sites that were only used for analyzing contemporary environmental gradients because they did not have a matching historical collection effort (32 sites). Closed squares represent sites with both historical and contemporary collection data that met the criteria of a matching sample effort across time and abundance levels for inclusion in rarefaction analysis, NMS, and MRPP (12 sites). Closed circles represent sites with both a contemporary collection and a matching historical collection effort that did not meet abundance criteria for inclusion in local rarefaction analysis, but did have matching sampling efforts for inclusion in NMS and MRPP. ......................................................................................8 2 The 95% confidence intervals for the regional rarefaction analysis of historical collections (solid line) and contemporary collections (dashed line) demonstrate a statistically significant difference p≥ 0.05 in species richness between the two groups beginning at aproximatly an abundance of 2000. .......................................................15 3 In the pre- and post- TTW assemblage comparison, I did not observe any grouping between the historic (open circles) and contemporary (closed circles) collections in the ordination space of the Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling (NMS) ordination.