Passive integrated transponder tags are a common method used in fish ecology research, and their feasibility for use has been well studied in salmonids. Several studies suggest that effects of PIT tagging may be species dependent and these effects should be addressed prior to conducting large‐scale tagging studies. In a series of laboratory experiments, we tested factors influencing survival and tag retention in Southern Redbelly Dace Chrosomus erythrogaster. In the first experiment, we tested the effects of tagger and fish length on survival and retention over 30 d for dace tagged with 9‐mm PIT tags. Survival was high (84%) while retention of tags was low (30%). We detected no significant effect of tagger experience on survival or tag retention. Logistic regression determined that tag retention increased with fish length. A second experiment showed similar trends for survival (80%) and retention of 9‐mm tags (25%) as observed in experiment 1, but retention (86%) was significantly higher for dace tagged with 8‐mm tags over the same period. All dace in our sham‐injection treatment (needle puncture of the peritoneal cavity) survived, eliminating needle puncture as a source of mortality. Our study, combined with a literature review of PIT‐tagging studies, suggests that dace and other cyprinids greater than 60 mm can be tagged reliably with 9‐mm tags and individuals greater than 50 mm can be tagged with 8‐mm tags. Received March 16, 2016; accepted August 15, 2016Published online November 8, 2016

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The invasive White Perch Morone americana occurs intermittently throughout Kansas and is ubiquitous in three Kansas reservoirs. However, a paucity of information on the effectiveness of sampling gears for providing accurate and precise estimates of size structure and relative abundance for White Perch precludes reasonable assessments of the effectiveness of control measures. The North American standard gill net has been used to sample White Perch in Kansas since 2010. Previous studies have provided selectivity curves for several species that are sampled with this gear to mitigate overall size bias, which is inherently present in gill‐net catches. However, White Perch populations have not been included in these initial studies. We fit selectivity models to catch data from three Kansas reservoirs to adjust the gill‐net catch data for contact selectivity. We used the most parsimonious selectivity curve to adjust the values for White Perch capture at length for 10 years of catch data. Most of the adjusted samples resulted in meaningful changes to the length distributions. To test for the effectiveness of the North American standard gill net for sampling White Perch populations, we measured the precision of the relative abundance estimates for White Perch and the frequency of obtaining 100 stock‐size fish with a standard sampling effort from 9 to 10 years of historical gill‐net samples. Our results suggest the North American standard gill net provides precise and robust estimates for the relative abundance of stock‐sized White Perch, but a correction factor that is derived from the selectivity curve might be needed to accurately estimate relative abundance for small individuals and to evaluate population size structure.