We Found No Stippled Studfish In Cleburne County, AL

We had a good trip today driving around the southern tier of Cleburne County in the Tallapoosa River drainage, southeast of Anniston, AL. We even seined in the Tallapoosa for the first time, where Highway 46 crosses it. But we found no stippled studfish. The short reason seems to be that the correct habitat doesn't exist in the area: clearwater streams over sand with no nutrient overload fueling rich algae growth. The Tallapoosa itself has both obvious nutrient enrichment and extensive bank erosional processes. We caught lots of sunfishes, bassses, shiners and even blackspotted killifish, but the right microhabitat for the stippleds wasn't there; it took us a while to clean out all of the thick, green, hair algae from the net afterward.

I'll post a more complete posting later.