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Overwinter Mortality Of Sympatric Juvenile Bluegill And Yellow Perch In Mid-Temperate Sandhill Lakes, Nebraska, U.S.A, Jeffrey C. Jolley, Mark A. Kaemingk, David W. Willis, Richard S. Holland

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Substantial mortality can occur in age-0 fish populations during their first year of life, especially in winter; this can potentially influence overall recruitment into the adult population. As such, we compared relative abundances between fall and spring catches of sympatric juvenile bluegill Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque and yellow perch Perca flavescens (Mitchill) to evaluate the magnitude of overwinter mortality across locations (five lakes for two years) and through time (one lake for six years). In addition, we compared both quantile-quantile and increment plots, based on length-frequency histograms from fall- and spring-caught cohorts from 2004 to 2010, to determine if mortality was …