Scarlet Shiners From A Now-Altered Creek

I went out to Limestone Creek along Mooresville Road today with James and Taito. It was a beautiful early spring day, sunny, high in the mid-50s F. When we arrived at our usual site we found that the banks on both sides had been bulldozed, and the ford connecting the two banks had been scraped such that the small shallow island on the far bank from the road is gone. This is bad for us since scarlet shiners prefer flowing pools near, above or below faster moving water. The current set-up is mostly fast-flowing water, almost like a mountain stream even though this site is fairly close to the Tennessee River in Limestone County to the west of Huntsville. But we went out anyway, and quickly realized that the scarlets were in one pocket of slower water immediately downstream of the former island. We were able to net about 23 of them without too much trouble once we realized where the sweet spot is now. We did some work upstream, but found those fast waters now to be loaded with darters (which is good, of course) but no shiners. People around here have a mania to "improve" streams with channelization, which only makes flooding events worse because the waters can really move fast and erode banks, mobilize sediment, etc.

Anyway, here's what it looked like today. The first shot looks across the historic ford here, now all nice and muddy. That should help with sedimentation in the creek, to leave muddy banks like this.

Here are James and Taito moving into the creek after pussyfooting through the muddy banks and not sliding in. The slow flow spot is to the right, downstream in this picture.

Andrew was in the lab much of the day working on a western blot run using the new, hopefully improved Ernie shortcut technique with some of the telescope and silverstripe brain samples we've collected over the winter. The scarlets we collected today are the final collection for this project, as the "nonbreeding" season is ending locally. Hopefully we can have a clear idea on the NMDAR levels in the fishes' brains in the next several weeks.