The vertical distribution and activity patterns of fishes during the evening and morning transitions between day and night were studied acoustically and by bottom trawling in November 1990-1992 in thermally stratified waters of the East China Sea. The acoustic data were collected from six stations with a scientific echo-sounder operating at two frequencies of 25 and 100kHz, and the echograms were used to determine the vertical distributions of fish. Biological sampling was accomplished by bottom trawling to identify fish species recorded on the echograms, and the species and length compositions were determined. At each station, vertical profiles of water temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen were taken with a CTD system and were related to the diel movements and the depth distributions of fish. During the day most fish were within several meters above bottom, but began to migrate upwards just before sunset, and during the night they were dispersed in midwater. Prior to sunrise with a thermocline present, one group of the fish aggregation occurred in dense schools slightly above the thermocline, while the other group occurred with the numerous single fish-traces bellow it. These groups of aggregations rapidly began to migrate toward the bottom across the thermocline from about 40 min before sunrise. Trawl hauls in the bottom strata below the thermocline with the characteristic single fish traces yieled invariably catches dominated by snailfish and fishing frog with minor quantities of other species in all stations. Hence, the results indicate that snailfish and fishing frog were the dominated scatterers in the depth strata below the thermocline, and the single-fish recordings were mainly snailfish. The fish species such as anchovy and juvenile mackerel in bottom trawl catches is poorly represented in relation to the mesh selectivity of the trawl net, but their occurrence suggest that the fish-school recording above the thermocline were due to these species which migrated vertically across the thermocline, with a temperature gradient of about 8℃, from the water layers near the bottom at night. Accordingly, we conclude that the vertical distribution and activity patterns of snailfish were strongly temperature dependent and in the termally stratified waters, the upper limit to diel activity was closely linked to the position of the thermocline.

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