Sorry, this isn't a diary about Iraq, election year strategy, or how the Bush administration gets their ideas from examining the guts of this week's #2 Al Qaeda guy. Nope. In fact, there's only the barest smidgen of politics in this at all.
It's about.... fish.
I mentioned several times that I have a degree in geology, which put me on the path to working for everyone's favorite bad guy, the coal industry. However, before I started dragging things out of the ground, I had another degree and another, very brief, career. I was - still am, at heart - an aquatic biologist.
Since I went to school in the middle of the country (let's hear it for the Murray State Racers), my study was not marine biology. In fact, it says so right here on my degree "Aquatic Biology (non-marine)." In fact, I did most of my research in streams and lakes around the Midwest and South Central US. No whales. No sharks. Not even any sting rays to liven things up. But what I did see... well, I'll get to that.
Like many people, I live in an area today that is rapidly transitioning from rural to suburban. The dairy farms that have been in the same family for five generations are giving way to rows of McMansions, and the few fields of cows and horses that remain are tiny green oases in the midst of growing stretches of blacktop and vinyl siding to vinyl siding accommodations.
It's very easy to see the changes this makes to the landscape. The hillsides are blasted flat, valleys filled in with their remains, and the mixed oak and hickory forest is cut down like weeds. Driving by one of these new developments, seeing the raw scab that's left from what was once rolling pastureland and wooded hills, you have to think of the lost wildlife and the ecological niches that have been ironed away to make more room for people climbing the "property ladder"
But you're only seeing half the damage.
What you don't see is what happens to all the little streams, springs and tiny farm ponds that dot the land. You don't see what happens to them. Or in them. Ponds are filled in. Little streams are "channelized" to carry the additional run off that comes from rain hitting all those impermeable roofs and roads. You may not think it makes much difference, after all, how much could live in those little tiny streams anyway?
You'd be amazed. Heck, I was amazed. I was a country kid, growing up fishing in a lake every single day of my childhood, and turning over rocks to find tadpoles and crawdads, but I still had no idea of the richness that exists in most streams. It wasn't until I got to college and started doing real surveys of aquatic life that I got to know some of these amazing creatures.
Darters
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Snail Darter |
Remember the Snail Darter? No, probably you don't, because it's moment of fame was back in the 70's. Back then, the Tennessee Valley Authority had planned a new hydroelectric dam, but it turned out that it would wipe out one of the last populations of endangered snail darters. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the fish, and the dam was busted. Think of the snail darter as the spotted owl of it's day, only tiny, and wet.
People made fun of the snail darter at the time. It's not the most distinctive of fish, with its brown body color and dark bars, and at about 3" long, it's not like anyone is going to think of it as a "sport fish."
When the snail darter entered the news, I had never heard of darters, but it turns out they are dozens of species. Almost all of them like swift, stony streams with lots of little riffles and pools. While the snail darter may be kind of bland, some of his relatives - some of the fish living in streams near you - are nothing short of spectacular. They have colors that nothing at your local aquarium store can match.
There are many more species of darter, most of them more subtly colored. I'm particularly fond of the Johnny Darter, which has spots in the shape of a "W," making it easy for beginning fisheries students to identify (when the difference between some species down to some detail of the internal organs, you appreciate the easy ones)
In every single native stream that I've sampled, I've found darters. And tiny streams sometimes have more than others. But in the channelized streams around new development, I've found exactly zero. Not a single darter lives in those straight, mud-bottomed drainage ditches that replace the original streams. They're just gone.
Sunfish
You're much more likely to have encountered sunfish than darters. If you have ever been fishing in your life, some little bluegill probably nibbled a worm off your hook. Or maybe you snagged a largemouth bass and got acclaim from your friends. Both are sunfish.
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Green Sunfish |
Sunfish live in streams, too. There's an amazing variety, from the gulping design of the Warmouth to the neon-blue sparkled flanks of the Pumpkinseed. Pygmy sunfish. Green sunfish. Long-eared sunfish. The ubiquitous Bluegill. All of them flash different, often brilliant, pallets of color. In breeding season, you'll find them dressed out with bright orange bellies, fins edged in scarlet. They're bold, assertive little fish that make their way into nearly every river, creek, stream, brook, and intermitant waterway in America.
In channelized streams, there are none.
Big Stuff
While Largemouth Bass favor larger streams and lakes, their more pugnacious cousin, the Smallmouth, loves to get up in little streams. Aggressive and fast as a silver missile, I've seen them moving like a wolf pack to cut up a group of sunfish, and wriggling up shallow riffles where more than half their bodies were out of the water.
While you northern fishermen might see pike all the time, I had never seen one, never even known they were around my home, until I tricked a fish the size of my arm out from under some beech roots at the edge of a stream so small I could have stepped across it. Toothy and strong, they're like freshwater barracuda, often turning up as lords of some small pool where a stream broadens out to make a turn.
If there are nice smallmouth, and big pike hiding in little streams, they're not a patch on the catfish. The state where I live now, Missouri, allows a peculiar kind of fishing called "Noodling." Noodling is when you start sticking your hand up under ledges and submerged roots waiting for a catfish to bite you. No, you didn't misunderstand. What you're after is a catfish so large, you can get your whole hand down the fish's gullet, then you drag it out of it's lair and up onto land. Really. I, personally, have never noodled, but I have watched the insanity (I always fear I'm going to pick the spot where a big snapping turtle decided to hide out). The type of catfish is called Giant Flathead Catfish, and they live up to that name. These fish are enormous.
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Noodling for Giant Catfish |
You'll find giant catfish in streams so shallow you could cross them in shorts without getting the cloth wet. You'll find both smallmouth and pike in creeks so tiny, you'd swear they couldn't keep their gills wet.
You won't find any of them in channelized streams.
Other Stuff
I'm rushing. There are literally thousands of different fishes just in my area of the country. Even what we think of as a minnow isn't just one fish, it's flashing Golden Shiners and bottom-feeding chubs and red-bellied Dace and black sided top minnows and Horny-headed chubs and... you'd never suspect how much variety there is in the small fish you see racing back and forth in most streams.
There's plenty of weird stuff, too. Ever heard of a madtom? They're hard to find, secretive little catfish. Many people seeing them mistake them for a tadpole, they're so small. Oh, and their spines carry a really painful dose of poison, so if you find one, be careful how you handle it. In your stream has been channelized, don't worry. They don't live there.
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Madtom |
What about a bowfin? These are ancient fish, looking very much like species that swam through American waterways tens - even hundreds - of millions of years ago. In the spring, an old bull bowfin will act as an escort to tiny young, leading the school to places to feed while driving off predators who think the young fish look tasty. Bowfin have a rudimentary lung that lets them keep going in bayous, swamps, and isolated pools even when the oxygen gets short and other fish give out. That still doesn't help them live in channelized streams.
Paddlefish! I have to talk about paddlefish. They're my absolute favorite, another hold out from long ago whose only relative lives today in China. Paddlefish have cartilaginous skeletons and smooth, scaleless skin. They spend most of their time in large rivers and lakes, acting like freshwater basking sharks as they open their unbelievably large mouths and sieve small life from the water while their strange "paddle" or "sword" juts out in font. These are big fish, sometimes over a hundred pounds and more than six feet long, but when it comes time to bred, they force themselves into small, clear-running streams that they need so their eggs will hatch. There aren't many streams like that left.
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Paddlefish |
I'm leaving out so many fish. Yellow perches and sleepy log pikes and creepy, slippery young lampreys, red horse and slender gars and chunky sculpins that hug the cold bottoms of spring-fed streams. Blind cave fish. Trout, I never even mentioned a single trout! Heck, there's too many to even think of getting to them all. If there are free-running streams near you, you have many of these fish for neighbors. If your streams have been channelized... you don't.
The Survivor
In surveys of dozens of channelized streams, there was one species of fish that showed up again and again. It's another one you've never heard of, the Common Stoneroller. Even in the murky depths of drainage ditches, I found stonerollers.
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Common Stoneroller |
There's nothing wrong with the fish. It has an interesting adaptation, a hard shelf along its lip, that it uses for rooting around the bottom of the stream and arranging small stones to make a nest. It's a perfectly nice little fish.
But it's a poor substitute for the color, variety, and beauty 0f the fish that live in a natural stream. If anyone is making regulations in your area to protect wild lands, tell them to be sure and add some protection for native streams. So often, there's no reason that the streams have to be ruined. And they probably would be, if people realized what they were losing.
Note: Fish images came from the American Fisheries Society and The Native Fish Conservancy. Catfish noodling images are from National Geographic.