Seasonal Habitat Use, Species Associations, and Assemblage Structure of Forage Fishes in Goose Creek, Northern Virginia. I. Macrohabitat Patterns

Forage-fish sampling was undertaken with seine nets and traps during non-winter season's of 1988 in middle Goose Creek, a mid-sized, warmwater tributary of the Potomac River basin. The spotfin shiner (Cyprinella spilopterus) was consistently dominant across seasons and stream reaches, whereas the subdominant/common forage fishes varied to some extent in their ranks at three macrohabitat stations. The spotfin was especially abundant in midsummer when species diversity was lowest, whereas most of the other forage fishes showed their highest relative abundances during spring and/or fall. Despite such heterogeneity at the species level, macrohabitat samples from late spring to early fall were statistically similar in structure at the fish-assemblage level.