Dear Prof. Rudstam,
I am responding to a posting on "fish-ecology" by Dr. Tyler who mentioned you have developed a fish hydroacoustic monitoring system.
I am working on the fisheries ecology of the Salton Sea, California's largest and most endangered lake. It is a hypersaline, hypereutrophic body of water near the Mexican border dominated by tilapia, an exotic species from Africa, but has three other marine species (orangemouth corvina, sargo, gulf croaker). The salinity is 40 ppt and rising endangering all of the species except the tilapias. In the past few years, catastrophic bird kills (thousands of grebes and pelicans) have died, blamed on diseased fish.
We are trying to get absolute densities per meter of the inlet rivers and in the lake. We've proposed to use a Smith-Root electrofisher for high salinities, but want to also investigate hydroacoustics. We're planning a large gill net and aquatic biology sampling program to correlate the length-based and age-based models and environmental parameters.
I can imagine how terribly busy you are, but any assistance at all you can offer in the technology you and others have developed to assist us would be most appreciated. We're dealing with an ecosystem that one writer has called "an environmental time bomb".
Best regards, BCP _______________________________________________________ Barry Costa-Pierce, Ph.D (Oceanography, University of Hawaii 1984) Fellow, Elected 1996, American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists SRFP Lecturer in Global Sustainability Department of Environmental Analysis and Design School of Social Ecology University of California, Irvine
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