Project
Identification of larval darters collected near Niagara Dam on Roanoke River
April 2022 - December 2022
Personnel
Participating Agencies
HDR Engineering, Inc. (HDR), on behalf of Appalachian Power Company, has requested laboratory services in support of their Larval Roanoke Logperch Study related to the relicensing of Appalachian’s Niagara Hydroelectric Project, located on the Roanoke River in Roanoke County, Virginia. Ours is the only lab that has developed methods to identify larval Roanoke Logperch. The contracted work encompasses laboratory processing, taxonomic identification, and DNA barcoding to identify larval darters of the genus Percina collected by HDR.
OBJECTIVES:
1) Sort larval darters from drift-net samples;
2) preliminarily identify Etheostoma and Percina larvae via morphometric characteristics;
3) use DNA barcoding to ascertain species identities of all putative Percina larvae.