We have had a very busy season! Now that our mailing list is back under control, I hope to get back to publishing a, more or less, regular newsletter. Now, where to start?

Some of our most exciting findings have been with the reintroduction projects we are involved with in Abrams Creek and the Tellico River. We first started our reintroductions into Abrams Creek in 1986! Tellico is a much more recent project, only a few years old now. The goal has been to reestablish four federally protected species back into these waters. Some of our archived newsletters (see Newsletter #4 and #24) outline these projects in a little more detail. The fish involved are: Erimonax monachus, spotfin chub; Noturus baileyi, smoky madtom; N. flavipinnis, yellowfin madtom; and Etheostoma percnurum, duskytail darter. All are available from source populations within the Little Tennessee system to which both Abrams and Tellico belong.

We stocked propagated fish into Abrams Creek for years before we saw any evidence that these were reproducing in their new home. In fact, it was several years before we saw ANY of the fish we had stocked. Today, three of the four are doing very well, are reproducing and dispersing in Abrams Creek. We have seen a few spotfin chubs in the past, but these have not appeared to establish themselves there. However, both madtoms and the darter are now showing up regularly in our snorkel-surveys! We are seeing great numbers of all three of these. Duskytail darters have not been stocked into Abrams for several years now and only a small number of madtoms have been recently stocked. It is not unusual for us to be able to find numbers that approach what we see in the source population (Citico Creek)!

Smoky madtom

At this point, the small stockings we are doing are primarily to "supplement the gene-pool" and to try to hasten their dispersal throughout the stream. We are not currently stocking any more spotfin chubs into Abrams. We are now stocking all of what we are producing into the Tellico River.

Now, speaking of the Tellico River.... This is a relatively new project in terms of reintroductions. We have been stocking the same four fish in here for several years now. So far, we are very encouraged at the results! We have seen several yellowfin madtoms, however all were tagged individuals....ones we had released. We have seen perhaps 20 adult spotfin chubs. All were likely fish we had released over the past two years (there appeared to be two size classes). We do not tag spotfin chubs due to their more fragile nature and the numbers involved. Only when we find young-of-the-year fish will we be sure of reproduction.

We have seen young-of-the-year duskytail darters in Tellico! We have seen evidence of reproduction in these darters for two years now. But, perhaps the most exciting find for us happened last night (Sept 21st). First, we found one of our tagged smoky madtoms. That alone was good news. But, a few minutes later, we found a young-of-the-year smoky! A few minutes later, another....then another. Four in all! When we look back at how long it took us to find evidence of reproduction in Abrams Creek, we consider our find in Tellico to be very encouraging!

yellowfin madtom

Tellico River has been treated badly in the past and still has some siltation problems, but there is enough good habitat that we are hopeful all four of these fishes will thrive there. We'll keep you posted!

Thanks for your patience while we got our list back in order.

Sincerely,

J. R.

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