Last Saturday several of us went out for another day of looking for the stippled studfish, Fundulus bifax in some tributaries to the Tallapoosa River in east Alabama. We were three for three, at one site in Coosa County and two sites in the Hillabee Creek system in Tallapoosa County. The good news is that there were lots of stippleds at all three sites. They are, of course, athletic and hard to catch unless you trap them in shallow pools along the creek. The big excitement was getting my truck stuck in what Andrew Acropora described as a "wall of mud" in the dirt road access at one of the Hillabee sites. Luckily for us I flagged down a passing car up on the paved road driven by a neighboring farmer who took pity on us and drove over on his tractor to pull us out.

Above is a male stippled studfish on Andrew's wading boot. Unfortunately I didn't get a good flared fins shot, but the color and stipples are good.

In the shot above you can see Andrew Acropora talking to Sybil, while James and Joe Scanlan are pulling a seine to the bank in the background. In this stretch of the creek we caught 7 stippled studfish; we could see them all over but they're extremely good at diving under a seine. All of the sites we've found stippled studfish in share several traits: clear water, a substrate made of sand and fine gravel (no sedimentation), a pH between 6.8 and 8.2, and extremely low total dissolved solids (TDS) between 8 and 25 ppm.