We Found A Flame Chub Today In Mud Creek In Tanner, Alabama

This is the one and only flame chub we found today in my first summer school "Stream Survey" class meeting. I had three historic locations to visit, all in the southern edge of Limestone County, Alabama, near the Tennessee. The first site we visited, Spring Creek, was pretty swampy but the creek had a gravel bottom in waist deep water in the middle. In 8 seinings we found bluegills, green sunfish and redbreast sunfish but no shiners or minnows. The creek showed evidence of degradation from poor soil management in the upstream farmland.

The second site, Mud Creek at Lindsay Road in the town of Tanner, was a pleasant surprise. The creek had trees as a riparian buffer, and a substrate of coarse gravel and crumbling limestone bedrock. Intact barbed wire fences kept dairy cows away from the creek, in their lush pastures. We worked about 300 meters upstream from the small bridge, catching large numbers of scarlet shiners, striped shiners and blackspotted topminnows along with some black darters. In the fourth pool system, making our last darter-dancing seining, I found a female flame chub in the middle of a pile of colored-up scarlet shiners. So now I've found flame chubs in 8 of 27 (30%) of the historic sites that we've visited, and at 5 of those sites we've only found one flame chub. In Mud Creek I estimate that we caught 300 scarlet and striped shiners, to one flame chub. So these are small populations, at best.

The third site on our visit list was Pickens Spring, which has hazy location information on my list from the UA Ichthyology Collection: "south of Old Highway 20", halfway between Greenbriar Road and County Line Road. Using GPS coordinates we found where it should be, which is behind a hay field and small band of woodland on a small farm. We started to drive down a dirt road near the farm house, but the road just ran into their back yard, so we backed out. I'm terrible about knocking on people's doors and asking, "Can we go look for minnows in your spring pool?" I shouldn't be but I am... So this site doesn't count as visited in my tally.

Next Friday there's the beginning of a 72 hour Bio Blitz at the Walls of Jericho state land in northern Jackson County to the east of here. I've been invited to go and sample the upper reaches of Hurricane Creek, a Paint Rock River tributary, on the property. My 4 students have all agreed to go for the day on Friday, which involves driving there, hiking in 2 miles, doing the stream work, and hiking out, uphill, before dark. It should be great!