25-02-2005 Benito Juarez
On the satellite images it looked like Benito Juarez had a lot to offer, lakewise. But our luck was turning. A lot of the lakes had become very shallow because of the draught. Many lakes were not deeper than 50 cm, and although we are studying shallow lakes, this is a bit too shallow for us. The lake we started with had a depth of about 80 cm, just enough to place our fishnets. We found out later that this lake appeared in 1980 after a very wet period. After this it never dried up again. It was incredibly eutrophic and we found a fish species with spines that we had not seen before.
By now we also got reinforcement. Carolina joined us from Uruguay.
The one lake that reached a depth of about 2 meters and an area of around 100 hectares was owned by two ladies from out of town. Even though we tried our very best to explain what we were doing, they did not want to give us permission to sample the lake. This was the first time this was happening to us. At another lake in our size class the owners were not around and the caretakers were not able to contact them as well which resulted in another ŽnoŽ. We decided to move on.
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