Conservation Fisheries, Inc.

Newsletter #7 July 15, 2001

Co-Directors Receive Awards

Pat Rakes and J.R. Shute receive the Aquatic Resources Conservation Award from TDEC.

It's difficult to find time to write articles for a newsletter this time of year! Hatchery work seems to take over our lives. Babies need special attention. Breeders need extra care and feeding. Food cultures become even more important. The list goes on! This, coupled with all of the field work...well, needless to say, we're busy!

Pat and I were honored with two awards this spring! The first was from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC). We were presented with their Aquatic Resource Conservation Award, in Nashville on May 18^th.

The second award was from the Atlanta office of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). On June 12, we received the Regional Director's Conservation Award. Needless to say, we are quite proud of these and wish to thank those that nominated us!

Duskytail Darters

Male Boulder Darter

Our work with madtom spawning seems to have its ups and downs! This year we have successfully spawned several northern madtoms (Noturus stigmosus) from the Hatchie River. These will probably be elevated as a distinct species from their more northern populations. These beautiful madtoms have been very cooperative for us. This is the first case for us where we have allowed a male to guard and hatch the eggs himself. This worked very nicely and we have had almost no mortality! We have collected two spawns like this and a third was evidently overlooked. The babies had already begun dispersing in the tank when I found the nest.
This is certainly preferable to our having to handle early madtom nests! The early eggs are very difficult to incubate and are very susceptible to fungal infection. We have established numerous pairs and groups of madtoms in various set-ups throughout the hatchery in hopes for having other spawnings. The difficult thing here is having to wait to check for larvae! The pairs have to be left alone for three to four weeks at a time. I hope to be able to report more future successes with madtoms!

We've had a great spring for darter reproduction! This may well turn out to be the best production year yet for duskytail and boulder darters. We had great luck spawning the duskytails in a group of around 15 fish in a long shallow trough. The trough was outfitted with fine river sand, ceramic slates and natural creek slab-rocks. The habitat very much resembled areas in the stream where we find them spawning. Nesting sites were checked only once a week to minimize disturbance. We collected nearly 20 nests from this group! This is far greater success than we've had in the past where we tried to spawn them in 20 gallon tanks with only one or two pairs per tank. Add to these several wild-collected nests and that adds up to a lot of baby duskytails! Survivorship has also been very good. One interesting note, all of the fish used as breeders this year were captively propagated last spring from wild-collected nests. The breeders were just approaching one year old!
The boulder darters have done well for us too. All of the breeders were older fish. We suspect this will be the last year for most of them. Some of the breeders are three and four years old and are starting to look a bit ragged!
We have found that they spawn well when set up in 20 gallon tanks with two males and around four females. Two spawning sites are constructed using two slates stacked such that there is an angled cavity. The fish deposit eggs in the space where the slates come together. The eggs are easily scraped off of the slates and incubated in plastic "shoe box" containers. The larvae are all pelagic and require feedings of powdered foods and, especially, live rotifers. We now have great cultures of rotifers going. As a result, we have had great survival of the larvae. As with the duskytails, this is perhaps the best year yet for numbers of boulder darters produced. The good rotifer cultures have also greatly improved our survivorship with the Cahaba shiners!


Noturus stigmosus babies at about 6 weeks.	N. stigmosus spawning tank

We've stepped up production of Barrens topminnows this year in hopes to be able to use these progeny to establish several refuge populations within their historic range on the Barrens Plateau. This is a project that deserves an article of its own, so look for that in the future!

Finally, we'd like to congratulate Dr. David Etnier! Ets "retired" this year from the University of Tennessee. I put retired in quotes because I suspect the university will not be rid of him that easily! He tells us that this will just get him out of the drudgery work (staff meetings, etc.). It will also allow him to take his time in returning from his island in the Boundary Waters in the fall. Here's a photo of some of us enjoying the fun at "Ets Fest."

J. R. Shute

July 15, 2001