Justin C Bagley‡§|, Maria Florencia Breitman§Corresponding author: Justin Bagley ( justin.bagley@adem.alabama.gov ) © Justin Bagley, Maria Florencia Breitman. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
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Here, we use long-term monitoring data from fisheries surveys across six Mississippi River reaches spanning >750 river miles to estimate length–weight relationships (LWRs) for 14 cypriniform fishes native to the Upper Mississippi River system. Relationships between log10-transformed values of fish total weights (g) and total lengths (cm) were analyzed using standard linear modeling and hypothesis testing approaches. Focal species included four North American minnows in family Leuciscidae [Notropis atherinoides Rafinesque, 1818, Paranotropis volucellus (Cope, 1865), Cyprinella lutrensis (Baird & Girard, 1853), and Notropis hudsonius (Clinton, 1824)] and 10 suckers in the family Catostomidae [Ictiobus niger (Rafinesque, 1819), Cycleptus elongatus (Lesueur, 1817), Moxostoma erythrurum (Rafinesque, 1818), Carpiodes velifer (Rafinesque, 1820), Carpiodes cyprinus (Lesueur, 1817), Carpiodes carpio (Rafinesque, 1820), Moxostoma carinatum (Cope, 1870), Moxostoma macrolepidotum (Lesueur, 1817), Ictiobus bubalus (Rafinesque, 1818), and Moxostoma anisurum (Rafinesque, 1820)]. Consistent with previous studies, estimates of parameter b were consistent with isometric or weakly allometric growth and ranged from 2.834 (P. volucellus) to 3.351 (C. elongatus), while parameter a estimates ranged from 0.00220 (C. elongatus) to 0.0144 (C. velifer).