2014 Rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax) survey Mount Desert Island, Maine

Connery, Bruce; Peterson, Chris; Helprin, William; Wheeler, Bik

From introduction: "Early in 2014, Dr. Chris Petersen (College of the Atlantic) and Bruce Connery (Acadia National Park) discussed with Dr. Claire Enterline (MDMR) how Chris and Bruce might conduct or lead presence/absence surveys of historically documented rainbow smelt runs (personal conservation, C. Enterline; MDMR) on Mount Desert Island (MDI). On March 28th a scouting trip of the MDI historic spawning sites resulted in a pilot survey strategy (http://www.maine.gov/dmr/smelt/documents/painstruct.pd[) to document the presence of adults smelt and spawning activity at historic ovi-position (egg-bed stream) habitat. A few streams that were reported as being historic spawning habitat were found to be of poor habitat or unavailable to smelt because of area development and dropped from the list of survey study sites. At the same meeting, Dr. Enterline suggested conducting a parallel assessment of spawning activity using a live-capture & data collection survey method at a site that held particular promise. Approximately a month later Bruce and Chris were joined by Billy Helprin (Maine Coast Heritage Trust) to establish the live-capture netting site at the mouth of Babson Creek. During this same time Chris and Bruce had began to conduct surveys for rainbow smelt at more than a dozen historic streams (i.e., brooks) on MDI (see map)."