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amount of downstream movement. Nevertheless, the evidence thus far suggests that most young <br />Colorado pikeminnow moved less than 6 miles during the winter period. <br />We hypothesize that age-0 Colorado pikeminnow exhibit an adaptive behavior wherein in the <br />summer and early fall they occupy backwater nursery habitats that provide refuge from the current, <br />preferred thermal conditions, and a productive environment where prey are likely to be encountered (Tyus <br />and Haines 1991). At this time, fish are widely distributed in the nursery area in deep and shallow <br />backwaters. But as temperatures cool in the fall, the shallower backwaters become cooler than the main <br />channel, even during the warmest part of the day. Fish tend to move downstream and congregate in the <br />deepest and largest backwaters where temperatures at the mouth of the backwaters do not fall below the <br />main channel temperature. It is in these large, deep backwaters that fish apparently overwinter (Haines <br />and Tyus 1990; Tyus and Haines 1991; Day et al. 1999). Occasionally during the winter, the river stage <br />increases, usually the result of an ice jam, and turns a backwater into a flow-through area. Some fish <br />respond by moving out of the area in search of nearby low velocity habitats, but others respond by <br />finding low-velocity micro-habitats within the area of the original backwater, perhaps behind uneven <br />bottom contours. After ice-out and spring runoff begins, more backwaters become flow-through areas, <br />resulting in fish movement downstream. <br />Effects ofFluctuation Discharge from Flaming Gorge Dam <br />We were unable to test whether fluctuating flows from Flaming Gorge Dam influenced <br />overwinter survival, primarily because there were too few age-0 Colorado pikeminnow in our study reach <br />to make overwinter survival estimates, and secondarily because we could not obtain the winter flow <br />fluctuations because of the national energy emergency during the winters of 2000-2001 and 2001-20002 <br />. Hence, we worked with the fluctuations provided during the normal Flaming Gorge hydropower <br />generation. Winter flows over three years ranged from 991 to 3,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), but the <br />xii