Abstract
Invasive carp has become a great challenge for aquatic ecosystems in the United States. Given the speed at which they grow and reproduce, we aim to better understand the transport and behavior of early life stage grass carp in streams to develop new strategies to control or manage their spread through tributaries to the Great Lakes. We conducted an extensive series of laboratory experiments in laboratory flumes at the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory and at the Ecohydraulics and Ecomorphodynamics Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, using artificial surrogates, live eggs, live larvae, euthanized larvae, and preserved fluorescein-dyed eggs. We tested live eggs and larvae under various flow scenarios, including bottom-mounted obstacles and submerged vegetation, to identify preferential paths, areas prone to capture, and behavioral response of young larvae to specific flow conditions. To control downstream drifting eggs and larvae, we also designed and tested various configurations of bubble screens to facilitate their capture on targeted locations on the riverbanks. Our results identified a strong dependance of egg properties on their transport, as well as an active response of larvae to turbulent characteristics of the flow. Oblique bubble screens showed to be very effective for buoyant particles, but produced low capture rates for near-neutrally buoyant eggs. An alternative, longitudinally-oriented design, proved to be the most effective by utilizing continuous helicoidal secondary flows pushing the drifting organisms towards side-mounted nets. A summary of these results, their challenges and applications at field scale will be discussed.
About the Speaker
Dr. Tinoco earned his Civil Engineering degree at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and obtained his MS and PhD degrees in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology group at Cornell University. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Hydraulics Institute of Cantabria, and was a visiting instructor at Cornell University before joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as assistant professor in 2015. Dr. Tinoco's Ecohydraulics and Ecomorphodynamics Laboratory at the University of Illinois focuses on studying flow-biota-sediment interactions through laboratory experiments, to better understand the underlying fundamental physical processes and use our understanding of small scale processes to implement solutions for large scale problems.
Host: Professor Leonardo Chamorro