Conservation Fisheries, Inc.

Newsletter #19 September 2003

I hope this finds everyone well! I expect most of you who depend upon getting into the water for your work are as frustrated as we are with the weather we’ve had this field season! It has pretty well kept us out of the larger rivers and made working even in the smaller streams difficult!

We did manage to get into the Tellico River yesterday (09/03). The water was low and about as clear as it gets. We found four adult spotfin chubs! These fish were either released early this spring, or late last fall. From the size of three of them, we believe they were probably from the fall release! We were very excited. We, of course, had hoped to be able to find some of these fish this year, but were prepared not to, based on the experiences we had early in our Abrams Creek reintroduction work. It was probably five years into that project before we started seeing our stocked fish there. 

We were very encouraged by this find. Spotfin chubs are probably very good at dispersing, and the river is quite a bit larger than Abrams Creek. There have also been several major floods on the river since our releases, including the largest one within 24 hours of our spring release! The habitat looks promising for these, as well as the other three fish we are working with in the Tellico (smoky and yellowfin madtoms and duskytail darters). We were unable to locate any of the other three. The madtom species are best looked for at night, and our night survey was cut short by a big storm. We will continue to survey the Tellico this fall as weather permits, but we feel like we’re off to a good start! 

Speaking of Abrams Creek, we have seen great numbers of duskytail darters this season. All of the fish we have seen this year have been wild spawned fish. These darters continue to move into new areas of the stream and numbers often rival those found in the source population, Citico Creek! We also continue to see yellowfin madtoms with good regularity. We have not yet surveyed the best smoky madtom sites, but plan to over the next couple of weeks. 

Production has been somewhat off this year for several of the species we are propagating. Unfortunately, our move came at a time that we should have been conditioning some of the breeders. We have had a great year for Barrens topminnows, and have managed to increase production several fold. We had a good year for duskytail darters and were fortunate enough to bring in a few breeders from the Little River this spring. This is a crucial population that has appeared to dwindle over the past 20 years. We hope to be able to move some of these propagated fish further upstream in Little River, above some of the impacted reaches of river. We have approximately 100 fish that will be moved back into the river this fall. 

We have tangerine darter breeders in place now from the Pigeon River above Canton, NC. We will attempt to captively produce these darters to be used in a project aimed at restoring the fish fauna of the recovering lower Pigeon River. We’re excited about this project just because they’re tangerine darters! What a beautiful fish!

There are some exciting things happening around CFI this month and I hope to be able to share them in the next newsletter. So, until then, here’s hoping for a little dry weather in the southeast. 

J. R. Shute

September 4, 2003