Return To Emuckfaw Creek

We made it back to Emuckfaw Creek in Tallapoosa County, AL, last Friday. Travis from my lab drove down with me, and Phil from the UAH Press Office followed in a UAH van for the purpose of photographing and reporting on our research. The following pictures were all taken by Phil Gentry; I realize they're the first pictures of this project that I'm in. Joe Scanlan drove up from Montgomery and met us at Emuckfaw.

We wanted to resample this creek because we hadn't found any stippled studfish there last March, when the creek was higher and we were wearing waders which limits your mobility in a creek. You really don't want to step into a hole in the creek and have cold water flood your waders. This time we went downstream from the road bridge, through fairly deep water, before we went around a bend and found a riffle system with some sandbars. And, with the sandbars, we found stippled studfish; only two, but we saw more that disappeared into emergent vegetation over really treacherous muddy/sandy sediments.

So, the first picture below shows myself and Travis holding the seine while Joe pulls out our first studfish of the day. He chased it out of the backwater to the left into the seine. This is a beautiful stretch of creek. If you look very closely you'll notice that much of the vegetation along the creek is a native rhodedendron, always a good sign.

Here's a shot of Travis and me wading downstream from this riffle system.

Setting a seine is something that seems easy but you have to do it just right, so that the lead line is tight on the bottom and the rest of the net forms a bag into which fish can be chased and snagged before they run out again. In the next shot Travis and I are setting the net in preparation for Joe to chase fish out of the backwater that produced our first studfish.

We found the second studfish about 100 m downstream from the first, along another sandbar forming a backwater pocket. Here's Joe doing the honors again, pulling a studfish out of the seine.

And, the final photo shows the first studfish of the day, probably a subadult female about 5 or 6 cm long (Phil inserted a one inch scale bar digitally). Our other fish was a fully mature male in breeding colors.

From Emuckfaw we went on to the last historic site that we hadn't sampled, Sweetwater Creek, about 7 km from Emuckfaw down a graded dirt road. This site had produced a single studfish in 1992. One of the collectors was the famous fish illustrator Joe Tomelleri. The creek looked good at first, but we quickly realized something was wrong. There were big tufts of algae growing along the bottom, and much of the sandy substrate was covered by a puffy layer of organic crud. The water stung any exposed cuts or bites, something that certainly didn't happen at Emuckfaw. We captured lots of small bluegills with the seine, not a good sign since they prefer more eutrophic water conditions than do studfish. We worked over 100 m of the creek and realized that this creek had been altered in such a way that studfish wouldn't do well. It's an open question what happened. This site is out in the middle of land used for industrial forestry, and we didn't encounter other people or see any obvious source of pollution such as agricultural chemicals. We could probably have bushwhacked upstream to see what we'd find, but we didn't really have the time for that, especially because a thunder storm was approaching. Another dead site.

We spotted another, unnamed creek on the map about 2 km from Sweetwater down the same dirt road. We drove down and found a very different creek, with shallow, clear water over gravel and sand. The creek bed was almost lined with petrified wood fossils, something I''d never seen before in Alabama. It turns out that parts of Mississippi and Alabama are the only places east of the Mississippi with petrified wood. I grabbed two small slabs and threw them in the back of my truck before we left. Before the thunder storm opened up over us we sampled a long stretch of this creek and only found young-of-the-year cyprinids, probably pretty shiners, but not a single adult. And there were lots of these baby cyprinids. The whole area was damp woodland with a thick cover of ferns on the forest floor. Lighting started cracking right over us as we finished so we jumped in our vehicles and headed out before we encountered any flooding on the road. I meant to grab more wood fossils, but it was more important to get the hell out of there while we knew we could. Our next trip will probably be to Cleburne County on the Georgia line next month to try to find new populations of studfish in the area where the Little Tallapoosa river runs into the Tallapoosa.