Species Recorded in the Lake

There is no census of Lake Champlain. What there is, for one group of animals, is a maintained agency checklist — and separately, a record of everything anybody has looked at, found and written down. The two lists do not agree, and the differences between them show more than either list on its own.

The checklist is the Lake Champlain Basin Program's Fishes of the Lake Champlain Basin, compiled from the Vermont Wildlife Diversity Program, NYSDEC and Quebec's MRNF. It has a column saying whether each fish lives in the lake itself or only elsewhere in the basin, and this page filters on it. The record is GBIF: every georeferenced occurrence inside the lake — not a rectangle drawn around it, but the fifteen polygons of this site's own lake outline, 1,144 km² (442 square miles), fossil specimens excluded.

What a record is

A record exists because somebody looked, found the thing, and wrote it down — so these counts measure attention, not abundance. The most-recorded species in Lake Champlain is the ring-billed gull, and the most-recorded fish is the yellow perch with seventy-nine. Both are what can be identified from a boat ramp with binoculars.

The sixty-eight fish the agencies list as living in the lake

Sixty-eight of them. Status codes are the states' and Quebec's: E endangered, T threatened, SC special concern, NON-NATIVE not originally here.

FishScientific nameRecords What the list states
Records is GBIF inside the lake polygon. Zero means nobody has posted a georeferenced record of it in the lake, which for a small fish that is rarely photographed is the ordinary state of affairs and not evidence of absence. The names are joined to GBIF through its taxonomic backbone rather than by matching the name text, because the agencies and GBIF disagree on enough of them that a plain name match would report zero for fish that have hundreds.

The twenty-two listed fish with no record in the lake

Twenty-two of the sixty-eight. Some of these are the lake's most-watched animals — the sturgeon has a recovery program, the muskellunge is stocked.

The six non-native species, in the USGS and GBIF records

The non-natives this site already tracks by occurrence. The USGS column is the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species database — deliberate, targeted survey — and the GBIF column is everything else. They are different kinds of survey, and the ratio between them shows which species get surveyed and which get photographed.

SpeciesScientific nameUSGS GBIFFirst USGS record

Other animals and plants in the lake

There is no lake-specific agency checklist for the native mussels, the snails, the aquatic plants or the plankton — so what follows is the occurrence record alone, grouped by class, most-recorded first.

Notes

Sources