Bifax In Emuckfaw Creek in Tallapoosa County

It's true, we found two there on Friday. Travis and I met Joe Scanlan there and Phil from the UAH News Office went down with us to photograph the trip for a future news item. (I hope to have pictures to post later in the week.) We started to go upstream from the road bridge, and quickly realized that there was no good habitat there; Joe described it as a "canoe river", a beautiful wide stream but with no features like sandbars preferred by stippled studfish. So we reversed field and worked our way downstream. We had to almost swim across one deep hole to get to a riffle system around the bend, which looked totally different from upstream. Steep rocky banks came down on one side, and both banks were covered by native rhododendrons. At the top of the riffle system was a sandbar with a slackwater pocket, and sure enough we were able to chase a studfish out of there into a net blocking off the exit along with a bunch of pretty shiners. We picked our way down the broken rocks in the riffle and hit another deep pool that we were just able to wade across. On the far shore was another larger sandbar with a slackwater that we had to scramble up a steep muddy/sandy bank to get onto. We could see studfish whipping around, but could only net one of them, a large male in breeding colors. And that was it for the day at Emuckfaw. But, we did catch two studfish, and just like I thought the species is still present in this stream. Most of the historic records for Emuckfaw are for one or two fish, with one of 15. So I guess we're in the typical range.

After a short lunch break we headed for a nearby stream, Sweetwater Creek, down a graded dirt road. A single record from 1992 showed one studfish collected at the site. That was more than we found. The creek was strangely odd. The sandy substrate was largely covered with thick algae or puffy sediment, and smelled funny. For the most part the small creek is standing pools connected by shallow runs and a dense, low plant canopy. The bad sign was that we caught lots of small sunfish, not typical of studfish habitat. I kept an unidentified darter, a pretty shiner and another shiner as vouchers. The stream runs through what appears to be timber plantation. We couldn't pinpoint why it seems degraded in a eutrophic way.

As a thunder storm slowly moved in on us, we decided to continue down the dirt road to another creek to the south. We found this unnamed creek and it looked good; shallow, clear, cool water running through a semi-wetland carpeted with ferns. Using our smaller, finer seine, all we found in this creek were hundreds of very young cyprinids of some sort, probably pretty shiners. Joe referred to it as a "shiner nursery", and I guess he's right, I've never encountered anything like it. The streambed was also littered with petrified wood slabs. Apparently Mississippi and Alabama are the only places east of the Mississippi with this kind of fossil. I kept two smallish ones, I'm sorry I didn't pick up more. But as we left the stream lightning was cracking closer to us and heavy rain started, so we got out in a hurry and left rather than take chances that the dirt road would become less passable with a heavy rain. Luckily it was fine.

So now I've hit all of the historic studfish sites on my list except for those in the mainstem of the Tallpoosa River. It seems that several creeks in Tallapoosa, Coosa and Randolph counties have good populations, along with the disjunct Sofkahatchee Creek in Elmore County. But we haven't encountered a new population yet. I hope to make a trip in July to Cleburne County, way upstream almost to Georgia, to see if any streams near where the Little Tallapoosa runs into the Tallapoosa contain previously unknown stippled studfish populations. I have no idea what to expect since I've never been to that area before. But until then we have work to do with running PCRs and starting to sequence amplified DNA.