And At Sweetwater Creek...

This is part 2 of our trip to Tallapoosa County, AL, last Friday, June 13. After finding stippled studfish at Emuckfaw Creek we headed about 10 km to the SSE to the last remaining historic site that we hadn't visited yet, Sweetwater Creek. It turned out to be anything but sweet water. Above is a shot of Joe Scanlan, Travis and myself wading up one of the nicer stretches of this creek. Much of the creek has big clumps of algae attached to the substrate sand, with puffy organic matter covering much of the rest of the substrate. The Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) for the creek was somewhat elevated for a typical stippled studfish stream, at 29 ppm. We weren't able to determine why this creek is unpleasantly eutrophic. Joe and Travis both complained of open wounds on their skin stinging when exposed to creek water. We found no stippled studfish in this creek, mostly we found lots of small sunfish along with a few pretty shiners and a single Tallapoosa darter.

Below is a photograph Phil took of the stream's edge. The substrate is sand, a good thing for stippled studfish. But you can also see that the substrate gets darker just away from the edge due to the aforementioned puffy organic matter.

And below we emerge from bushwhacking up the creek, back to the dirt road where a wooden bridge crosses the creek.

As a thunderstorm moved in on us we drove south on the dirt road to an unnamed creek indicated on the map. It was shallow, but a lot cleaner than Sweetwater Creek. Below is the three of us using my smaller, finer seine to sample one of the bigger pools on this creek. Behind me is a small dirt cliff created by several trees falling over, and their exposed root balls have created this funny pocket we're standing in. The only fish we found in this creek were huge number of small, young of the year shiners of some sort, probably pretty shiners.

Below is Joe looking intently at a seine with several of these baby shiners in it. If you click on the photo you can see it in larger scale.

I just wrote to Pat Rakes at Conservation Fisheries today asking him for some specimens of a related species, the Barrens Topminnow, Fundulus julisia so we can extract DNA for our project. Hopefully he has some available for this kind of work.