Fish
The Drawa National Park’s ichtyo-fauna consists of 39 different fish species and 2 kinds of lamprey. Very popular ones as well as those rarely seen in Polish waters are present in the DNP. It is possible due to a considerable differentiation of the DNP waters. The Park’s two main rivers – Drawa and Płociczna – belong to the greyling fishing country. They are characterized by fast currents and small charges of biogeneous substances. They provide excellent breeding environment for those fish that need a water current and a rocky, sandy, or gravel breeding ground. The most characteristic water-current fish is salmon, a bi-environmental fish that reproduces and breeds in clean rivers. After several years in the river they turn into the so-called smolt and move to the sea, where they feed intensely to rich adulthood and return to the river for spawning season. Until the mid-1980’s the Drawa salmon was present in Drawa and Płociczna and was famous for its fast growth (a specimen 144cm long that weighed 24kg was found in 1962). The population of the Drawa salmon virtually seized to exist in the late 1980’s. In the year 1995 a process to restitute the population began by letting over 20 thousand smolt cultivated from roe coming from the Latvian river Dałgawa. The stocking had been repeated annually with progress already visible after two years: 32 large nests of salmon from which several young specimens were taken.
Besides salmon, greyling is also present in the DNP rivers, as well as three biological forms of trout: migrating trout – a form reproducing and breeding in rivers, and then reaching adulthood (as salmon) in the sea, lake trout – a form reproducing in rivers and reaching adulthood in lakes, and brook trout, which spends its whole life in the river. Another specie present in the DNP waters is Baltic vimba. It is a bi-environmental fish as well, which reproduces in clean rivers and spends its adulthood in estuaries and the less-salty coastal sea-water. In the Park’s waters Baltic vimba creates local lake-river populations without undertaking the migration to the sea. This specie has been pronounced as critically endangered on the national scale. Besides the afore-mentioned fish species, also present in the DNP waters are some rare and less known ones, such as: white-finned gudgeon, Eurasian minnow, chub, bitterling, loach, thunder-fish, smooth loach, and the lampreys—river lamprey and lake lamprey.
In the DNP lakes, species typical for the whitefish-, tench/pike-, and pike/perch-lakes are present. The quality of water in some lake makes possible the reproduction and breeding of coregonide family fishes: lavaret and whitefish. Both these species have high environmental expectations, therefore their natural places of abode are the deep and well-oxidized lakes with sandy or rocky bottoms, and with stonewort vegetation. Whitefish is present in the Lakes Pecnik Duży, Płociowe, Marta, and Ostrowiec, while lavaret inhabits Ostrowiec, Marta, and Czarne in which its population is of the endemic character. Also worthy of noticing is the autochthonous population of lake trout that inhabits the passage lakes in River Płociczna’s system and reproduces in Płociczna’s tributary Runica
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