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RESULTS <br />River reach abundance estimates.--A total of 3,800 Colorado pikeminnow was captured. <br />in the 42 sampling occasions (passes, includes fourth pass fish) of the five reaches during <br />sampling from 2000-2003 (Appendix I). Of those fish captured, 3,212 (84.5%) were captured in <br />only one year and not seen in any other year, 532 (14%) were captured in each of two years, 48 <br />were captured in three years (1.3%), and only eight fish (0.2%) were captured in all four <br />sampling years (Table 1). We estimated abundance of Colorado pikeminnow adults and recruits <br />in each of the five river reaches of the Green River Basin for each sampling year to determine <br />spatial abundance patterns and temporal dynamics. A set of eleven models was fit to the data to <br />examine the importance of year-specific apparent survival (S), reach transition probabilities (?&, <br />probability of a fish moving from one reach to another), and capture probabilities (p's, Table 2). <br />The top model in the set of eleven contained 35% of the AIC weight, with the only competing <br />model (# 2) differing in the degree of the polynomial of TL used to model capture probabilities. <br />The third-best model with variable survival over all three annual intervals had a very high and <br />unreliable survival estimate for the 2002 to 2003 interval and was not further considered. <br />Therefore, we made inference from the minimum AIC, model. That model had 81 parameters <br />and included quadratic and cubic effects of TL to model a single S over the 2000 to 2003 period <br />(three length effects, one S, four total parameters), a linear effect of TL to model ?& (a single <br />length effect plus 20 pi's, one each for fish in a given reach moving to any of the other four <br />reaches for each of five reaches; 21 total parameters), and quadratic effects of TL to model p's <br />(two length effects, plus those for five reaches, three sampling passes per year, three or four <br />sampling years depending on the reach, 56 parameters). We held effects of length on estimated <br />parameters constant, which makes the reasonable assumption, for example, that length effects on <br />25