Tobes, I.; Ramos-Merchante, A.; Araujo-Flores, J.; Pino-del-Carpio, A.; Ortega, H.; Miranda, R. Fish Ecology of the Alto Madre de Dios River Basin (Peru): Notes on Electrofishing Surveys, Elevation, Palm Swamp and Headwater Fishes. Water2021, 13, 1038.
Tobes, I.; Ramos-Merchante, A.; Araujo-Flores, J.; Pino-del-Carpio, A.; Ortega, H.; Miranda, R. Fish Ecology of the Alto Madre de Dios River Basin (Peru): Notes on Electrofishing Surveys, Elevation, Palm Swamp and Headwater Fishes. Water 2021, 13, 1038.
Tobes, I.; Ramos-Merchante, A.; Araujo-Flores, J.; Pino-del-Carpio, A.; Ortega, H.; Miranda, R. Fish Ecology of the Alto Madre de Dios River Basin (Peru): Notes on Electrofishing Surveys, Elevation, Palm Swamp and Headwater Fishes. Water2021, 13, 1038.
Tobes, I.; Ramos-Merchante, A.; Araujo-Flores, J.; Pino-del-Carpio, A.; Ortega, H.; Miranda, R. Fish Ecology of the Alto Madre de Dios River Basin (Peru): Notes on Electrofishing Surveys, Elevation, Palm Swamp and Headwater Fishes. Water 2021, 13, 1038.
Abstract
Our study analyzes the ecology and distribution of fish communities related to the environmental variables of the Alto Madre de Dios River, an Andean-Amazon watershed of southern Peru, between 300 and 2811 m a.s.l. within the Manu Biosphere Reserve. We provide new ecological and diversity data for these highly unknown rivers and new data for palm swamp habitats. With electric fishing techniques, we collected a total of 1934 fish specimens belonging to 78 species, 42 genera and 15 families. To assess main patterns of diversity we combined SIMPER and ANOSIM with canonical correspondence analysis to obtain an overview of the community structure of fish and their distribution related to aquatic habitats. Our results show an important shift on fish diversity at 700 m a.s.l. separating headwater and middle-lowland communities. Electrofishing was a hindrance due to the depth, flow and low conductivity of the rivers, but also allowed us to capture fish not observed with other techniques. We also compared the use of elevation with slope as an alternative variable for statistical analysis. Our results show that slope offers a solid and equivalent explanation for fish distribution variability, avoids redundance, and instead of giving geographical data offers ecologically solid information.
Keywords
Tropical Andes; Manu Biosphere Reserve; Astroblepus; Trichomycterus; Mauritia flexuosa
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Anatomy and Physiology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
