Day Nine: The Real Fish Fun Starts

June 16, 2015

           

 

 

           I woke up at 6:00AM refreshed and ready to start the day.  We left the hotel around 7:00AM to pick up the rest of the team over in Hamilton where we me up last night.  We got there around 7:30AM and assembled our team.  There were three people from Fish and Wildlife Service: Jeff, Drew (who is in charge of the GIS database for our office) and myself.  The other two members of our team were from the Geological Survey of Alabama (GSA) and their names were Rebecca (Becca) Bearden and Anne Wynn.  Jeff, our fish identifier, was happy to have Becca on our team because she works under Dr. Patrick O’Neil so she also knew her fish and could help him out.  We got everything in order and headed out to our first site.

 Once we were there I offered to carry the back pack shocker. This site was better than the one yesterday.  We got a higher number of fish species and higher abundances but this creek still showed damage from 4-wheler activity.  I had a good time using the shocker and because I was wearing waders, I did not get shocked by it at all.  At this site we also encountered a landowner and Jeff talked to him.  He was curious about what we were doing but completely OK with having us out there, which was good.  At this site Jeff was glad Becca was there not only because of her skills in identifying fish, but also because she decided to call me Dee when she had trouble pronouncing my name.  I don’t mind that much when people mispronounce my name but he was feeling bad about messing it up.  He was very relieved that I was alright with the nick name.

            At the second site we switched up some jobs.  Jeff, who had been on the seine team, took the shocker and I worked the seine with Anne who had been using a dip net. Becca took notes and both she and Drew were on dip nets.  This site was worse than the first one.  There were not very many fish and as we went up stream the habitat was not very good.  It got hard for us to continue to move forward so we went back down stream of where we started.  This part of the stream was only marginally better because we could not see what was in the water due to the sediment we had kicked up.  This was a real problem because if the fish did get stunned by the shocker, we could not really see them before they got a hold of themselves and swam away. There was not much tree cover at this sight either so we were really ready to get out of there by the time we had finished the thirty efforts and two shorelines.

            When we arrived at our third site I offered to take the back pack shocker again.  This site was not very good either but I still had a fun time.  Because of the lack of habitat, we mostly did shore line shocking with the dip nets.  We mainly caught madtoms, only a few darters, and not much else.  My thumb actually started to hurt from using the shocker in so many of the efforts.  Efforts are attempts to get fish; anything from shocking them into the seine, hauling the seine across the bottom of the stream, to shocking in an area and dip netting, counts as an effort.  It was a lot of thumb work which I was completely unprepared for— I should have played more video games beforehand.

            When we were done with our third site we still had plenty of time to spare so Jeff decided that we should go for a fourth site.  Becca took the shocker for this one and I was on the seine with Jeff.  Working the seine was harder in this stream because it was deep with slick rocks and had a strong current which really pulled on the net.  This was a nicer site and we surprisingly did not get many fish but we kept on going even though it was rough against that strong current.  The site ended up taking about two hours to get it done.  When we got back to the hotel we were told that there was a mix-up and someone had already completed that site (hence the lack of fish), but it’s always good to have more data to compare.  It was a long day so right after eating dinner at the hotel I went back to my room and went to sleep.

           

Day Eight: The Fish Trip Begins!

June 15, 2015

            I woke up at the usual time to get ready, but because I would be going on a week-long trip to north-western Alabama, I chose not ride my bike to work. I do not trust myself to ride with both a duffle and book bag on my back. So as I waited for my ride get ready, I double checked my gear.

           I got into the office a little before 7:00AM and was instantly sucked into the swirl trip preparation. We had six people from our office going on the trip: Jeff Powell, Andy Ford, Tim Mullet, Drew Rollman, Eric Spadgenske, and myself.  Denise Rowell, Public Affairs Officer, also followed us on her own; she was coming along to get some footage for a video about the Hutton Program and the fish sampling.

            Our fish sampling was to be scored using an Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI).  The Butthatchee watershed is a priority watershed in Alabama because of its diversity, and has been designated a Strategic Habitat Unit (SHU). The IBI scoring of each stream is used to give it a rating based on things like diversity and density of fish species, health of the fish, amount of suitable habitat and others factors. All the stream ratings together can give the scientist a fairly good idea of the health of the watershed as well as giving them a good inventory of the fish that live there. They use that score to monitor the status of the stream and to see if conservation efforts are making a difference.  This type of information can be helpful in a variety of different ways and can be used by a lot of different groups, many of which I found out would be out there with us.

          Along with the people from our office, there were two people coming from the Mississippi Ecological Services Field Office, as well as biologists from the Alabama Power Company, the Geological Survey of Alabama (GSA, including Dr. Patrick O’Neal, one of the authors of Fishes of Alabama), and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM).  I was a bit nervous about being able to pull my weight on a team. The teams were a mixture of people from the different organizations and I did not want to reflect poorly on the Alabama Ecological Services Field Office. 

          Once everyone arrived, we met at a site on Luxapalila Creek to do our first sampling. I had a bit of trouble putting on my waders since it was the first time I had ever really worn them, but soon the whole team gingerly scooted into the stream and the sampling officially began.  I was handed a dip net and a jar to voucher fish.  I watched as the more experienced members of the team shocked fish into the seine and did seine hauls.  I help dip net fish when we shocked along the shorelines.  Everyone would crowd around as Jeff and Andy identified the fish and called numbers to the data recorder. As time went on, I felt much better about my ability to contribute to the team.  I was amazed by the variety of fish found in that little creek. 

        Another part of their job become quite apparent—talking to locals and educating them about what we’re doing. About half way through our sampling, a local resident came over to ask about what we were doing. Jeff took the time to stop our collection and climbed out of the creek to talk to him. It is important to keep up good relationships with local landowners and tell them what we are doing.  I’m sure they probably wonder about what all these strange government people are doing in their creek.

       While Jeff was talking to the landowner, we all took a break and Denise interviewed me (and later Andy) for her video.  After he came back, we finished up the last of the sampling and headed back to the hotel to get cleaned up.  We ended the night by eating dinner with other team members. It was an amazing experience, and I couldn’t wait to do it again!