In an effort to improve our understanding of the life history and recruitment of estuarine fishes we initiated a series of monitoring surveys of larval and juvenile fishes in the Great Bay - Little Egg Harbor estuary. It is intended that these, and long-term measurements of physical parameters in this National Estuarine Research Reserve (available water quality data), will provide a baseline for understanding seasonal and annual variation in fish abundance in this relatively unaltered estuary for comparison to other more impacted estuaries and as a basis for understanding the effects of perturbations such as overfishing, climate change, etc. The longest time series is for larval fishes (ichthyoplankton) at Little Sheepshead Creek, just inside Little Egg Inlet (Witting et al. 1999). This night time weekly sampling has been conducted with a plankton net (1 m diameter, 1 mm mesh) on flood tides, to capture ingressing larvae, since 1989. A program to sample representative juvenile fishes, that can be captured by wire mesh trap (minnow traps - length=45 cm, diameter=23 cm, mesh=0.63 cm), is conducted several days a week in the RUMFS boat basin and this has been ongoing since 1990. In an attempt to evaluate fish response (avoidance, entry/exit, general behavior, etc.) to these traps we have mounted a camera in one of these traps which is constantly displayed in Ken Able's office at the station (see photo at left). Another juvenilefish survey, which incorporates otter trawl (4.9 m head rope, 19 mm mesh wings, 4 mm mesh cod end) sampling at representative habitats across the Mullica River - Great Bay - inner continental shelf salinity gradient, was begun in 1997. This series is conducted in July and September to enhance collection of young-of-the-year. These data sets have been used to describe aspects of the first year in the life of estuarine fishes (Able and Fahay 1998) and make preliminary evaluations of relationships between larval abundance and abundance of juvenile fishes relative to monitoring technique (Able and Bologna in prep).

Map of long-term study sites