Watching for what’s in the water

Archived Outdoors

Watching for what’s in the water

By Michael Beadle

It’s mid-morning at Cartoogechaye Creek just below the Macon County Recreation Park’s tennis courts in Franklin.

Bill McClarney, a veteran aquatic biologist, instructs a dozen volunteers to put on waders and descend into the cool, foot-high waters of the Cartoogechaye to see what’s living there.

As program director for the Little Tennessee Watershed Association, McClarney leads youth groups and adults on fish sampling expeditions to study the health of the ecosystems in the Little Tennessee River and its tributaries.

“We want to know the condition of this stream,” he tells his crew as they grab nets, buckets, a tape measure, clipboard, backpacks and a seine that will be used to gather about a dozen fish samples along some 100 meters of the creek.

In the 17th year of his work in the Little Tennessee River watershed, there continue to be lots of questions. What lives here? What is the health of the ecosystem? Will fish samples show signs of an aggressive species or endangered ones at risk because of pollution or sediment run-off? Will there be any new or rare species in the creek?

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While McClarney monitors the creek to analyze fish data from year to year, it’s also a chance for him to share his incredible wealth of knowledge about the hundreds of species that thrive in this creek. Today’s volunteers include a high school senior from Franklin, two Texas A&M college graduates, and a group of students and adult leaders from Project Challenge and Western Carolina Pacesetters, regional programs that offer innovative outdoor projects for youth who have to serve community service or restitution.

The volunteers all chip in right away to help net fish, carry equipment, hold up the seine or lug around buckets for each sampling. On other days, the Pacesetters and Project Challenge groups might be helping keep local rivers clean by hauling off garbage from these scenic areas. Today is a hands-on lesson in what lives under water.

McClarney and Rivers Woodward, a home-schooled senior from Franklin, strap on gas-powered backpacks and carry long poles with loops on the end that administer a small electric charge into the water, exciting and stunning the fish temporarily so they can be caught easier.

“The idea is to catch them as fast as we can,” McClarney tells the volunteers.

While a trio of volunteers hold up the seine downriver, McClarney and Woodward walk upstream along the sides of the creek as netters fan out behind them scooping fish into nets that are then emptied into five-gallon buckets. The goal is to go into different parts of the creek — deep areas, slow-moving pools, shallow areas, fast-topped sections and riffles, or mini-rapids.

The creek will join up with the Little Tennessee River about a mile downstream, so monitoring the ecosystem here might offer clues about what will happen to further downstream. McClarney samples areas from Fontana all the way to Rabun Gap in Georgia — about 30 sites a year involving more than 100 volunteers.

“These people are here out of the goodness of their hearts — or the idleness of their nature,” he says with a sly grin.

With his bushy white mustache and quick wit, Bill McClarney is a Mark Twain in waders, a man more apt to chide his volunteers with a clever turn of a phrase than bore them to death with research mumbo-jumbo.

When he picks up a hand-long hogsucker, he offers volunteers a chance to smooch the fish’s puckered lips. Megan, one of the student volunteers from the Pacesetters/Project Challenge group, gladly takes the dare and kisses the fish. None of the male volunteers follow suit.

As professed lover of snakes, Megan picks up a squirmy lamprey and asks, “Do they bite?”

“No, nothing to bite with,” McClarney replies. True enough, the lamprey in larval form doesn’t have eyes or fins, so it lives in the sediment like a worm.

The first few samplings include silvery Tennessee shiners, wide-headed river chub, rusty-colored crayfish, and sculpins. Sculpins are black bottom feeders that use their fins to crawl around on rocks, McClarney explains. Another fish, the stoneroller, has a hard lower lip to scrape algae off rocks.

“They’re just like cows; they need pasture,” McClarney says.

The male river chub, meanwhile, grows horns around mating season in May to jostle with competing males. While the river chub may be an ugly fish to some, it serves an important role in the ecosystem, McClarney explains. The males build rock nests in the water to catch females who lay their eggs. After the males chase their mates away, other fish such as the Tennessee shiners — which are not big enough to build such nests — can meet and mate there as well.

Further upstream, the team nets more species — gilt darters, rainbow trout, rock bass, and warpaint shiners. Fingernail-sized fish are not counted in the sample because they could skew the data.

After logging the numbers, McClarney or a volunteer empties the bucket, releasing the fish downstream so they won’t be caught a second time. McClarney and his team might catch some 300 fish and an estimated 15 different fish species in a typical four-hour sampling.

“People get different things from these surveys,” McClarney says.

Some enjoy the relaxing sound of the water. Some like the biodiversity. Some have a favorite species that intrigues them. While on one sampling expedition, McClarney noticed a young volunteer who looked like a city girl unaccustomed to being in a creek, but she quickly got involved. At one point she was holding the bucket of fish samples, a seemingly low-maintenance job.

“Why are you carrying the bucket?” McClarney asked her.

“’Cause I get to look at the fish more,” she replied.

McClarney still enjoys that reply, the simple wonder of watching little creatures with all their various colors and fin designs dart and glide through the water.

Sadly, the Cartoogechaye Creek is littered with all kinds of man-made debris — metal wire, softballs and baseballs from the nearby park, aluminum cans, potato chip bags, a trash can lid, a newly disposed diaper, concrete blocks and bricks. While some fish may end up using bricks or concrete blocks as a natural habitat, with plastics or metals you never know what types of chemicals might be leaking into the water. On the day before this creek sampling, students from Western North Carolina Pacesetters picked up a dozen giant bags of trash in and around a local waterway.

“It seems like last year we caught a lot more fish,” says Lisa Bates, district supervisor for Pacesetters and a regular volunteer for McClarney’s fish monitoring program.

Sedimentation continues to be a major problem worldwide for river monitors like McClarney. He worries about overdevelopment along the shores of area streams, creeks and rivers. Lack of shade trees not only warms the river and disrupts the temperature for some habitats; it also leads to sediment run-off. Soil and mud seep into streams and creeks and spoil clean water areas vital to certain kinds of fish.

What can be done?

There’s the regulatory route, being a whistle blower and telling a regulatory agency that a company or individual is polluting a river. There’s the grassroots conscious-raising effort, opening dialogue with building contractors and developers so they can be more aware of their impact on the environment. And then there are the landowners. Local residents can learn how they affect waterways and help care for streams that run through their property.

Over the decades, McClarney has used all three approaches with varied success. Sometimes, it’s building education and awareness at the grassroots level. Sometimes you have to report major polluters to the regulatory agencies.

By early afternoon, McClarney catalogs the last sampling at Cartoogechaye Creek. It’s not simply the number of fish that shows the health of the stream, McClarney explains; it’s the different kinds of fish, the percentage of certain types of fish, and the health of the fish. For example, in a healthy ecosystem, there should be a high number of insect-eating fish such as shiners, minnows and darters. McClarney reports that today’s catch is about 25 percent insectivores instead of the ideal 50 percent. And while sediment hurts some fish species, it’s actually beneficial for others like the lamprey. Omnivores, meanwhile, will eat anything, so they have the best adaptive diet and may not be clear indicators of problems within an ecosystem. On the other hand, intolerants are the species that first disappear when waters become polluted — the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. In Cartoogechaye Creek, those intolerant species are the rock bass and gilt darters, which are found in healthy numbers on this particular monitoring session. Another interesting find is the olive darter, a pointy-nosed rare fish McClarney might only catch once or twice a year.

Today’s catch yields 19 native species and more than 500 fish. The overall score is a 45 out of a possible 60, the high end of a “fair” rating, or about average for a stream of this size and location. The creek hasn’t received a score this high since 2002. Its highest ratings in the 17-year monitoring came in the late ‘90s when scores were up in the 50’s. Still, a 45 isn’t too shabby.

“We’re back up to what we used to get here,” McClarney says.

Ultimately, McClarney sees these kinds of watershed studies as 500-year projects since the rivers and streams of a region are essential for the life of all who are a part of it.

“What we’re doing is writing history,” McClarney says.

And it’s not just for scientists to study. McClarney believes people from all walks of life have a right to know if they live in a healthy environment. The long-term goal is that people will eventually see the need for biodiversity and environmental monitoring services as much as they now demand a public library or fire and rescue services.

In the meantime, you’ll see McClarney out in the rivers and creeks, making sure that all the right species are still there alive and well.

To learn more about the Little Tennessee Watershed Association, go to www.ltwa.org.

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