March of the Sculpin: Measuring and Predicting Short-Term Movement of Banded Sculpin Cottus Carolinae

We tracked the short-term movement of 51 Banded Sculpin Cottus carolinae in 600 meters of Little Creek, Tennessee during April-May, 2015. Objectives included assessing the efficacy of current dispersal models, evaluating temporal variability in movement, and testing for switching between mobile and stationary behaviors. Movement did not differ from modeled leptokurtic movement kernels estimated from the ‘fishmove’ Package in the R Statistical Environment for 12 of 13 recaptures. Leptokurtic dispersal kernel parameters for the mobile component and shared stationary component were temporally dynamic and differed from static median values reported in ‘fishmove’, while the more abundant stationary component agreed with ‘fishmove’. The recapture occasion during which model predictions were not validated was associated with a large flow pulse that stimulated increased movement at the population scale. Twenty-eight individuals switched between stationary and mobile movements and the frequency distribution of switches was leptokurtic. Results reveal consistent upstream movement by Banded Sculpin despite variability in population responses to flow and individual switches in movement. This paradox represents the march of the sculpin, in which fish move upstream at a constant rate despite multiscale variability in movement behaviors. Our study supports application of ‘fishmove’ toward predicting movements of rare fishes to promote conservation.