Darter and shiner newbie ID questions

I went out Sunday and sampled the creek by my parent's house. It's Bad Creek in Fulton County, Ohio; HUC 4100009. I believe that I only caught two different species of fish. I didn't keep any, just took their pictures and put them back.

I think these first two pictures are johnny darters. I caught around 20 of these.

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The shiner pictures didn't come out very well. I know that farmertodd has shown these to me, but I couldn't ID them. I think they are emerald or spottail shiners. They were a very nice iridescent purple on the top half (above the lateral line), and plain silver on their bottom half. I caught a couple of huge ones - four or five inches long. There were gobs of them in assorted sizes, I caught 30 or 40.

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There were also a lot of these little clams.

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Not long ago, they 'cleaned' the banks. Why do they do this? My mother ranted about it, "I learned about erosion in third grade!"

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From top to bottom... Johnny Darters, then Creek Chub, then the last pic of fish with three the top and bottom ones look like fathead minnows and the middle one I'm not too sure about but it might be a silverjaw minnow.

I would agree w/ smbass...3rd pic definately creek chub.

They clean banks like that for three reasons, primarily:
1) if it is a flood conveyance channel reducing the bank roughness moves water more quickly
2) removing the vegetation allows for easier viewing of erosive damage (seems counter-intuitive, but it is amazing what disasters can be hiding under a bush). Is either side of the stream bermed (e.g. created with a dyke?)
3) trigger happy and/or stoned operators working under old/outdated maintenance guidelines....either municipal or agricultural.

Thanks! I would have sworn the shiners were all the same species, but now as I study them I see slight differences in head shape, etc. I am in awe of your knowledge!

The creek is not bermed, but it is getting wider as the years go by.

Yeah I see a silverjaw in there too. Nice stuff

<sigh>

They clear the banks because that's how they've always done it. I'm not even sure I know what the answer is and I don't know how to get anything different across to the people in charge, even at the county level (We joke the local extention offices are known as the "Soil IN Water Conservation Districts" ).

We're looking at these ditches right now in the Sandusky Watershed. And it's extremely frustrating, especially when I know I could be working on this problem in a watershed where it really would make a difference for a less tolerant biota, or even one where people just care about the quality of the watershed. Sadly, in the Huron Erie Lake Plain (appropriately abbreviated the HELP), everything that could have gone is gone.

I mean, here I am, talking to a guy, who has a 10th grade education (not that I'm anything special with my fancy degrees), won't read anything I hand him, who thinks this way is fine, "it's worked for years", and I'm a real rotten big mouthed liberal a-hole if I try and _suggest_ anything different. What do you do?

We were out with one such fella last week (I don't know that he's as extreme as my generalization), and he got defensive when I was debating among my colleagues what amount of channel evolution was enough to satisfy one type of habitat to contrast the trapezoidal <ahem> habitat. This was us talking shop, and it certainly didn't have any moral judgement attached to it. He was ready to tear into me. And he's one of the cooperative guys!

He insists that we're standing in places where there "weren't fish never before" (although that's quite the contrary, if he'd pick up a book) and that I'm attacking people's livelihoods. Any argument they can make, so that they can do whatever it is that they see fit to do, regardless of what costs the rest of society is paying for their choices.

This is the exact reason Findlay, OH has made the national news not once but TWICE in the last year due to getting flooded out. Conveyance in the Blanchard is SO good now, that during a peak event, it all piles up at the I-75 bridge (the first bottleneck), backs up, and floods the downtown of a reasonably sized municipality. And guess who's paying for the damage? Know what the decade climate models are for our area? Warmer and WETTER, with bigger events. Lord have mercy if we get a 10" storm here. A 7" about put every one out of business.

One answer is an oversized channel that allows vegetated benches to form while 1) maintaing subsurface drainage [good for fields] 2) maintaining a primary channel [good for sediment assimilation and biota] and 3) quadrupling the storage at lower gradient (dig sideways, not down) [good for reducing peak pulse]. It cuts down on velcoity of discharge, creates storage and uses herbaceous plants to create channel roughness, which gets a lot less people up in arms (although willows are better). We're asking for 15 feet (that the government will pay for) and you'd think we were asking for the sacrifice of their first born at dawn.

Susan saw what a difference an overwide makes first hand in the Portage River watershed. Would you believe a DITCH that scored 45-50 on an IBI? Greenside darter were the domiant species with suckers right behind them. Pimephales minnows had probably (although I can't say this for sure) the lowest abundances in the whole assemblage.

Now... the money that went into that installation was ridiculous and I can't tell if the effect was from the over wide or the willows downstream that slow stuff down. There were bigger benches out of the modified segment then in it But I'll bet those willows are sprayed in the next year or two and brush hogged like we see in Susan's Bad Creek photo. So we'll see if it holds.

A more aggressive potential answer is to hire a GIS savvy hydrologist and an economist and let them come up with a footage assessed "coefficient of contribution" to any peak flooding. It'd take them about a week. Want to do what you want to do? Fine. Spray. Dip out. But pay for your damages, dangit. What about the livelihoods of the people who's shops took 100% losses on their merchandise and were out of business for 6 weeks during cleanup, only to go and do it all over again 4 months later, when they no longer could GET flood insurance because of the first flood?

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle of all that. And I can gaurantee I'll be out of this area before that answer arrives. There's more productive causes to wage if I'm going to have persist for any particular cause.

<sigh> Back to ordination and discriminant analysis. What a silver lining.

Todd

Edited by farmertodd, 29 April 2008 - 04:04 PM.

Oh, and the bivalve is a pea clam, a native Sphaeriid mussel. You'll probably find some of the tolerant Unionids up there too.

Todd

Sorry to upset you while you're studying, Todd! I was happy to see so much life in there. Bad Creek has had so many toxins dumped in it in the past. Things are improving, but as you said, people want to do what they've always done. There are a lot of people out there that just don't like to learn new things. (shudder) There's not much you can do with those folks, but try not to let them ruin your life.

Todd, thanks for your rundown on the evils of old-fashioned channelization as alleged flood control. The subtle trick that most people miss is that you want to hold and slow down water rather than let it go whipping along at high speed; that's what any kind of "natural" system will do. Maybe I should re-post my pictures of channelized creeks in Huntsville with snide remarks, and see if I get more hate mail from Bureau of Land Management types...

Nah, Susan, I was already aggitated about this. You just gave me a forum to vent. I feel much better now

If there's one single take home message from my rant... It's that I DON'T know what the answer is. But we'll never work toward an answer if these guys won't back it off. We'll probably have to wait until the current cohort retires. Otherwise, it'll require an intervention of the government (Army Corp, County Engineers) and that ain't gonna fix anything.

The good news is, the people coming up in the districts are a little more forward thinking. It was night and day when we met up with the gal from the Seneca County office. She has to deal with a similar guy who's in charge of maintenance... Fortunately, that office has ZERO money, so the disturbances are less frequent, which'll help with our study and contributes to the relative health of streams like Honey Creek which Brian Z and Nate T have mentioned.

In case you're curious, our study is looking at time to "recovery" after dip out. But beware... that "r" word is one we aren't allowed to use around the first guy... I mean seriously, can you believe that?

Again... He's cooperative. The guy in Wyandot County that ol' Jeffro pissed off... That's borders on hilarious (so sad you have to laugh, else you'll cry).

Todd

Nah, Susan, I was already aggitated about this. You just gave me a forum to vent. I feel much better now

Glad to help!

In case you're curious, our study is looking at time to "recovery" after dip out.

What's 'dip out'? Is that when they 'clean' the ditch with a backhoe? I hate it when they do that. Thankfully it doesn't happen often.

Yep, when they scrape everything out to hard pan clay. They would get a ton more ecosystem and fluvial services if they'd scrape above the vegetative benches they're dipping out, and go laterally. If they did it twice in the normal dip out schedule (or just paid for it up front, which would probably cost less because some of the expense is getting the equipment there), now they have a flood plain.

Same work, same amount of money, less frequent disturbance, waaay more storage. And their subsurface tiles still drain the same danged way. It's as simple as that.

Todd

The creek is not bermed, but it is getting wider as the years go by.

Then, from an engineering safety standpoint, there is no reason to clear the veg in that manner. From a flood control standpoint and to speak to Todd's very detailed explanation of the benefits of widening and benching these drainways I agree that slowing the water down can reduce the amplitude of flood events significantly and greatly increase habitat benefit, however, there are instances (apparently not in this case) when it is desired to "shoot" water through an area to "beat the peak" from upstream areas. I actually had a recent experience where our standard stormwater management facility design (state mandated) was not compliant with the local municipalities most recent hydrological study becasuse it delayed the site runoff too long and added to the upstream hydrograph peak, thus compounding the high water conditions.

Yeah, there's no "shoot" anywhere here lol. We're talking about a foot a mile of fall, if that. A slight rise can result in a very deep ditch (and those may be the places you're talking about). Most of the ditches under maintenance are former headwater streams, or seeps out of former swamp or wet prairie areas, where the ditch drops the water table by about a meter. That is, they're the source for each stream.

What these guys DON'T get is that you have to evacuate the water already in the mainstem before they get to evacuate their water. It's like Walmart the morning after Thanksgiving Day. MOST of the "deals" are still there at 9:00. But we all don't get to live in the right hand tail of the normal distribution, now do we?

We also get bimodal pulses where the first peak is flash and the second is the tiles. It's quite pronounced. If we could leverage the flash into a smooth curve to the tiles, things would be a lot more secure downstream. But the people here just want the water out, as fast as possible, period, without considering any accumulative effects downstream.

And I totally agree, one solution does not work for ALL places. I think each ecoregion needs to evaluate the properties of their geology and find a solution that's appropriate to that.

What line of work are you in Scott? Are you in engineering? Or a hydrologist? Have you done any overwide or 2-stage implementations?

I'm finding these terms more in the vernacular around here, especially in the rainwater garden way. I think overall, the trend will be for the better. I'm waiting to see a detention pond with native plants in it, and I don't think I'll need to wait that long. But that's commercial where people are educated and seem at least more interested in cause and effect.

The farms however... Man, I honestly think the county engineers know what addresses storm pulse better, they just don't want to deal with the farmers either

Todd

I am a civil engineer (Envirionmental Resources and Forest Engineering from SUNY ESF) but also have an AS in Ecology from Paul Smith's College. I work for a small (5 person) design/consulting firm that focuses on site development design. I primarily do the stormwater management design and plans through the NPDES/SPDES program. Took some soul searching before I could take the job, I watched the wetlands I grew up in get filled in for houses. My thought is that some a**hole is going to do the work, if I do it I know I consider the bigger picture when designing. The NYS DEC is pushing native plantings which I heartily agree with, even if it is just hydroseeded conservation mix from local suppliers. I have been trying to install, if not native species, ornamental varieties of native species or similar in landscape plantings. Balsalm fir instead of douglas, red pine instead of austrian, etc. Still has to pass the client litmus tests. Also appropriate plantings for a given groundwater regime. Blue spuce died next to the ditch you say?....plant a black spruce or hemlock.

I guess the term "shooting" is relative to the local hydrology, as you said. I mean that sometimes consideration for getting runoff into a conveyance system and past a point of bottlenecking, like that bridge, before the major stormwater pulse reaches the outfall is desired to minimize maximum flood stages. Playing with Tc (time of concentration). I guess it is like beating the rush on the day after turkey day, but those instances where it is required are very infrequent. On a large scale the best is to provide extra habitat, I mean floodplain storage (its all about wording, isn't it... ).

Very cool. One thing I'm having a hard time conveying to engineers is the infiltration rate the native plant roots allow. They're designing for peak storm and just letting the periodic storms go out 12" at a time (going from seconds to minutes) with about zero recharge. Essentially the bare minimum besides what the ground soaks up inherently.

However, I know I can store my house and my half of both my neighbors houses in my rainwater gardens that are completely undersized (see neighbor reference), but are apparently oversized in that there's space underground. That's just my Tom Bombadil annecdote (if you happen to be a Tolkien fan )

Do you know of any quantitative studies that examine the mean infiltration rate of native plant communities used in bioswales? That might give me something to work with.

Does that make sense?

Thanks!
Todd

It does make sense. Its funny though, if we build a pond that wasn't designed for infiltration purposes doesn't hold water due to infilitration, they require it to be lined. Seems silly, but there is pretreatment that is required, which takes space. Infiltration practives also require more space in general, and when the developer is looking at loosing lots to accomodate an infiltration design vs. a standard detention approach...

One thing I noticed was the area in my picture above, where the bank was covered with brush, was a neat, boring channel with few fish. The brush will grow back in a few short weeks, anyway. The areas with just grass meandered around, the banks slumped in places, there were undercuts and channels and lots of fish and other life. Here's a shot of the grassy area:

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Edited by schambers, 30 April 2008 - 01:36 PM.

Yeap, and my SWCD buddy would tell us that ditch needs cleaned out soon.

That's all we're talking about here... Great pics Susan. The ditch will form a sinuous channel on it's own. Just take the ditch sides back 15 feet and wow, you have a stream.

The comparison of these two habitats was my masters work. Abundance, richness, trophic guilds, all double in the bench section than the homogeneous section.

This also demonstrates how woody plant material can work against you, as the thermal benefits are lost becuase it's too thin a buffer, the geomorphic benefits are lost because the wood is pulled out, and it shades out herbaceous plants from stabilizing sediment. In my transects it was all crappy exotic reed canary grass, and a lot of this was re-homogenized during the long durations of the big storms the last two summers.

So if this were seeded with some of the native prairie grasses, who knows where it would go? I'm in contact with some folks who are doing this in the Tippecanoe in Indiana, and I look forward to getting involved with their projects this summer.

And talk about storing carbon... All those roots, all that infiltration... Man.

Tom Bombadil, over and out.

Yeap, and my SWCD buddy would tell us that ditch needs cleaned out soon.

My folks say one of the neighbors upstream complains every time his field floods, so they come out and bush hog the banks. He's not popular. They've only dug the ditch out twice in the last forty years or so, but when they do, they assess everyone several thousand dollars.

My folks say one of the neighbors upstream complains every time his field floods, so they come out and bush hog the banks. He's not popular. They've only dug the ditch out twice in the last forty years or so, but when they do, they assess everyone several thousand dollars.

Yep. And that's the ticket right there... Get everyone else to understand what OTHER costs are associated with that couple thousand dollars, give them an alternative, and suddenly Mr. Trench really isn't very popular any more.

I mean he's the guy that's been costing everyone, because he CHOOSES to farm in a flood plain (which is as much a part of the stream as the main channel, it's just dry more often than not) and we tolerate this why? We pay out that money why?

I'm trying to round up research and the supporting papers for something that I heard recently (from what I hope is a reputable source) that created zones in farm fields in terms of "distance to waterway". The study showed that farming something like the last 50 feet next to a ditch or stream (depending on stream order) was a net LOSS over the 10 year cycle.

In effect, all those crop years in the "most fertile soil" were still outweighed by one or two losses in the same term. We're paying for this why? This doesn't even account for run off and fuel emissions that we all "pay for" whether they're in real dollars or not!

Now, one question I had is whether those losses are offset by government subsidies. That's a known problem. If the government is the crutch these guys are leaning on, then that's something we all can address.

But it's also extremely problematic that I just spent 30 minutes on ISI and Google Scholar and couldn't find a single reference

I'm going to get on the horn and drill some people about this. They've had some lingering comeuppance to address with me, and they better have their facts in line. I may be on nature's side, but I'm still a scientist and a skeptic, and I've been reasonably polite so far. But they called down the thunder, and now they've got it... It's showtime! lol

Might be cool to put together a pdf flyer out of this.

Todd

Edited by farmertodd, 01 May 2008 - 07:17 AM.