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<br />Colorado pikeminnow move seasonally (mostly in summer), fidelity of fish appears high to <br />reaches sampled for abundance estimation because fish move back to those reaches by spring. <br />Thus, the apparently low level of permanent emigration to unsampled reaches does not <br />dramatically affect survival rates, which makes apparent S more closely approximate true S. A <br />second implication of these data is for abundance estimates themselves. The mostly seasonal use <br />of canyon reaches such as Lodore and Whirlpool Canyon, and likely lower Yampa Canyon, <br />suggested that most Colorado pikeminnow moved to alluvial reaches by spring when abundance <br />estimation sampling was conducted. This means that abundance estimates for Colorado <br />pikeminnow for the reaches sampled in this study are likely representative for the entire Green <br />River Basin because they are not biased by presence of large numbers of Colorado pikeminnow in <br />unsampled canyon reaches. <br />Recruitment rates.--Reduced recruitment may also be responsible, in part, for the decline <br />of adult Colorado pikeminnow in the Green River Basin. The RIP set the definition of a recruit as <br />a Colorado pikeminnow 400 to 449-mm TL (U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2002). Based on <br />expected growth of about 43 mm/yr for Colorado pikeminnow in the 400 to 449-mm TL size- <br />class (Osmundson et al. 1997), the average recruit-sized Colorado pikeminnow would become <br />part of the adult population the following year. The expectation of recovery goals is that <br />recruitment will, over time, balance mortality of adults to produce a stable adult population. In <br />other words, the adult population is maintained when the number of adults that die in year i is <br />balanced by the number of recruits present in year i - 1 that survive to the following year. The <br />percentage of recruits in samples used for abundance estimation that were collected during the <br />period 2000-2003 (4.9 to 13.3%) suggested that recruitment was not sufficient to offset the 35% <br />52