Recent Surveys of Fishes from Western Kansas

Abstract

Twenty-four species of fishes are reported from qualitative surveys of rarely collected streams in the Republican River basin of Cheyenne County, the Smoky Hill River system of Wallace County, the Salt Fork Arkansas River drainage of Barber and Comanche counties, and a pond in the Saline River basin of Trego County in Kansas. Special reference is made to protected species in Kansas, distributional records, and future considerations. Few comprehensive surveys of the fishes from streams in western Kansas have been conducted and reported in the literature. Surveys by personnel of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks (Kansas Fish & Game Comm., 1977, 1978, 1979a, 1979b) provide most of the recent information available for the stream systems included here, but there were a limited number of collection sites in some drainages and voucher specimens are lacking. In addition to these studies, Cross et al. (1985) thoroughly summarized the known collections from the Arkansas River and its tributaries. General compilations of previous collections from the areas of western Kansas sampled by us in 1986-1988 can be found in Cross (1967), Cross and Collins (1975), and supplements by Collins and Caldwell (1978) and Collins (1981). From 1986 through 1988, qualitative surveys of fishes were conducted from six sites in the Upper Republican River drainage of Cheyenne County, three sites in the Smoky Hill River drainage of Wallace County, ten sites in the Salt Fork Arkansas River drainage of Barber and Comanche counties, and one site in the Saline River basin of Trego County (Fig. 1). MATERIALS AND METHODS Collections were made with single-panel seines of several lengths with 6.49.5 mm ace mesh and a 14 m bag seine with 6 m panels (9.5 mm mesh) This content downloaded from 157.55.39.224 on Sat, 27 Aug 2016 06:06:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Arikaree R. Saline R. Pond* WaKeeney Cherry Cr. El St. F ancis Ellis