Conservation Fisheries, Inc. Newsletter #21 January 2004 |
New CFI Board! |
Well, it’s a
new year and we are eagerly anticipating the upcoming spawning season!
CFI has recently made some exciting additions to its board of directors.
As originally organized, the board consisted of myself (J. R. Shute),
Pat Rakes and John Tullock. Most of you probably know Pat and me; some
of you know John as well. I will include a little bio on John along with
the newly elected members below.
We are pleased to announce the following as additions to the CFI Board of Directors:Richard
Biggins
Dick has a
Bachelor of Science from the University of Connecticut and a Master of
Science in Fisheries from the University of Arizona.
He was a fisheries biologist for the Vermont and Utah Fish and
Game Departments for over 10 years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From 1978 until his retirement in 2002, he worked for the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service specializing in the listing and recovery
of endangered aquatic species. He
received the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Meritorious Service
Award, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Champions Award,
and the Freshwater Mollusc Conservation Society’s Lifetime Achievement
Award for his work in the conservation and recovery of aquatic
endangered/threatened species. Dick
and his wife Margaret spend summers at their home on Georgian Bay near
Parry Sound, Ontario, and winters in the Smoky Mountains near Asheville,
North Carolina.
J.
R.’s comments: Dick has been a friend to CFI for many years! He
recognized the importance of our work early on, and has always been a
great supporter. There are few people that have done more to help
protect southeastern aquatic species! Dick thought he was going to
retire to a life of carving wooden fish decoys (which he does an
incredible job of!), but we have other plans for him!
Chris
Cameron
Chris grew up
in Knoxville fishing the banks of Beaver Creek. He graduated from
the University of Tennessee and for the past eight years he has served
as Vice President of Investments for UBS Financial Services.
Chris has served on other area boards, including:Vice President
Moses Teen Center
Treasurer of
Senior Citizens Home Assistance
President
Appalachian Anglers
The hobby that
takes up the majority of Chris’ time and that he enjoys most is
saltwater fishing. When not fishing, he enjoys reading, cooking,
and spending time with his family. Chris and his wife Julie are
expecting a baby girl, due this spring.
J.
R.’s comments: Pat met Chris through his wife, Nanci. After realizing
that Chris was interested in the outdoors, Pat invited him to go along
with us on some of our snorkel surveys. A trip or two into some of our
beautiful streams was enough to convince him that he had a real interest
in our rare non-game fishes. We look forward to dragging him back out
with us this upcoming field season.
David Etnier
David A. Etnier
(Ets) received his PhD in Zoology at the University of Minnesota in
1966. He has been a teacher/researcher at the University of
Tennessee since fall 1965, and is currently an emeritus professor in
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In
addition to the important contribution to the state’s aquatic
conservation, The Fishes of Tennessee, co-authored with Wayne
Starnes, Etnier has published over 60 papers, predominantly on fish and
caddisflies, but he also has reported small mammal and bird sightings.
Etnier has had an odd sort of luck that has resulted in discoveries of
several other fishes, or populations of fishes, that had previously been
thought to be extinct or extirpated (smoky madtom and trispot darter,
for example). However,
Etnier’s discovery of the snail darter, and subsequent publicity
related to Tellico Dam has probably resulted in the most notoriety.
J.
R.’s comments: I don’t know anyone that has contributed more to the
understanding of the distribution and taxonomy of Tennessee (indeed
southeastern!) fishes. I won’t even try to enumerate the fishes and
aquatic insects Ets has described, or the wide variety of animals with
the name etnieri as a specific epithet (there’s a T-shirt that does
that). Nor could I list all of the aquatic biologists that have trained
under Ets (including yours truly and Pat). We have always consulted with
Ets and we are very proud to have him serve on our board!
Steve
Scarborough
Steve
Scarborough attended Middle Georgia College, Georgia Institute of
Technology, and Southern Polytechnic Institute. He is active in river
conservation and works as a design consultant for Watermark Sports.
Steve holds five patents related to recreational products and
manufacturing processes and has designed nearly two hundred canoes
and kayaks that are produced and sold worldwide. A founder of
Dagger Canoe Company, he is an avid river enthusiast and now lives
on White's Creek in Roane County.
J.
R.’s comments: Steve has been a friend to CFI for several years now.
We originally met through a mutual soccer friend, and he quickly became
interested in the work CFI was involved in. He’s had quite a job on
his hands trying to educate a couple of fish heads and was absolutely
invaluable in our recent purchase of our property. We could never have
pulled this off without him! Thanks Steve!
John Tullock
John Tullock is
Community Relations Manager for Barnes & Noble, Knoxville. He
is the author of nine books on aquarium keeping. A tenth book on
native orchids is in preparation for Timber Press. He is the
founder of the American Marinelife Dealer's Association.
J.
R.’s comments: John also graduated with a Master’s degree from the
University of Tennessee where John, Pat and I all met. John worked with
us from the very beginnings of CFI, when we were just a small room in
the back of an old lab in the U.T. zoology building! John has always
been a champion of environmental protection and worked hard to promote
ethical collection and handling practices within the marine aquarium
industry.
Other News
Well, although
sometimes it seems like all we do is paperwork, there are some other
activities going on around here. We have recently rearranged things in
the “Madtom Room” including finally plumbing some of the systems
that have been functioning as independent tanks over the past year. For
those of you that don’t know, the Madtom Room is a small room
designated for the propagation of our madtoms. Since these guys are all
nocturnal, trying to provide them with food several times during the
dark hours presents certain problems for caretakers. We have set this
room up to be on a reverse photoperiod, that is, it’s dark during our
day. This allows us to feed the madtoms several times throughout the day
(their night!). We have always postulated that good conditioning might
be one of the reasons we have seen only limited aquarium spawnings of
madtoms. Part of what led us to believe this was that some madtom
species tend to feed well, even during daylight hours and will eat
almost anything offered. These also, as it turns out, are some of the
easier madtoms to spawn! The ones that tend to be picky about what and
when they eat also tend to be more difficult to spawn! Certainly this is
oversimplified, but there may well be a correlation to madtom feeding,
conditioning and spawning success. This year should give us our best
test to date as to whether or not this is the limiting factor for
successful madtom spawning.
This year, for
the first time, we will be attempting to propagate tangerine darters, Percina aurantiaca!
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