The Little Tallapoosa System Is A Mess

We made it down to the Little Tallapoosa River drainage yesterday, along the Cleburne and Randolph County border. The river enters Alabama from Georgia here, and it's a mess. Below is a photo of the Little Tallapoosa at Cleburne County Road 49 near Ranburne, AL. If, as is likely, this river supported stippled studfish populations, it doesn't now. It's loaded with sediment and the substrate is soft unconsolidated sediment. Several creeks we looked at were smaller versions of this, the result of agricultural land uses and attendant nutrient enrichment running off into streams. All of the structures I saw in Google Earth images that I thought were poultry houses, really were, and there are lots of them in this area and upstream in Georgia. So there are a lot of relatively small contributors to these degraded streams, which is a sad story; you can't blame any one polluter because it's really almost everyone. Below is Knockes Creek along County Road 10. I had high hopes for this creek because it runs off of Turkey Heaven Mountain, a forested area with no poultry farming. But it turned out to be a mess with tires in the creek and broken glass all over, not even counting almost no current, heavy sedimentation and aquatic vegetation more typical of a pond than a creek. We didn't bother to enter the water.

The one kinda OK creek was Cohobadiah Creek just across the Randolph County line. But like some creeks we saw last month, it had the wrong morphology for stippled studfish; rocky but no sand. We found lots of tallapoosa shiners and burrhead shiners there, but no sign of stippleds. At that point it was very hot and we had run out of possibly OK creeks, so we called it a relatively early day.

So there don't seem to be any stippled studfish populations in Cleburne or northern Randolph counties; Cornhouse Creek is the northernmost population now, in central Randolph County. This further reinforces my view that this species is now limited to 6 populations south of Lake Wedowee in Randolph County, and to the south in Tallapoosa, Coosa and Elmore counties. The Tallapoosa River south of Lake Wedowee may be able to support stippled studfish, we haven't been able to test that. If so, the 6 extant populations may not be totally isolated. We'll see, as always.