What Lives in It

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. This page puts them side by side. They do not agree, and the disagreement is more informative 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. That is not a statement about how many gulls and perch there are. It is a statement about what can be identified from a boat ramp with binoculars and what cannot.

The fish the agencies put 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 string, because the agencies and GBIF disagree on enough of them that a plain name match would report zero for fish that have hundreds.

The ones nobody has recorded

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 — which is a good demonstration that this column is about who posts data, not about what is in the water.

The six with two records each

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 not the same kind of looking, and the ratio between them shows which species get surveyed and which get photographed.

SpeciesScientific nameUSGS GBIFFirst USGS record

And everything else in the water, which has no checklist at all

This is the part the fish list cannot reach. 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. Read it as a map of where people have looked.

Notes

Sources