I took a trip to bluenose territory earlier this week to check on my guys - I haven't been there since Katrina. I checked three sites where I have found bluenose in the past - two of them were very reliable. One, as I may have mentioned in the past, had been bulldozed. Here is a picture of what was once a surefire bluenose site, after the parish bulldozed the creek. That's BG Granier in the photo.


I went to see if there was any change, and there wasn't, really. THe bluenose were not there at any rate. So I went to site two, which is on the same creek but a couple of miles away. The place where I had always found them in the past was gone - overgrown with brush, it had apparently been gone for at least a couple of years. Site three (actually I stopped there first, as it is quite a distance from the other sites) has never been a reliable producer. So, I was neither suprised nor disappointed to find no bluenose there either.

So on the way home I decided to stop by "trash creek" to pick up some flagfins. I don't normally go there because I can get all the flagfins I want a lot closer to home. I call it trash creek because I have encountered hog carcasses along with assorted garbage bags, mattresses, TV,s and what not pitched into the creek (next to the "no dumping" sign, of course!). Here is a photo of the trash creek, minus MOST of the trash.



That black looking thing at the bottom of the photo (kind of on the left side) is a box spring from some kind of mattress or sofa. I was standing on it while collecting fishes. I spotted a likely looking school of flagfins, and ...something else. My first net rewarded me with flagfins and several bluenose! I had never heard of bluenose being at that site, but BG confirmed that he has seen them there on a couple of occasions. I was disappointed that they were not yet in their spawning colors (no longear nests were observed), but I was glad to see that they had not disappeared completely from any accessible site.

The plants in the lower right are golden club, and from the dinner-plate sized plants I first encountered several years ago, these things have turned into mosters - 5 feet across! (if I'm a man). I broke off a couple of the spikes which appeared to have mature fruit on them (I hope so) so that I could try to grow them in my pond.

Edited by Irate Mormon, 03 May 2008 - 06:04 PM.

Are bluenose shiners listed in Louisiana? If so, how can the parish get away with bulldozing habitat without jumping through a million hoops (other than the obvious answer)?

cool! and thanks for calling it "trash creek"

Are bluenose shiners listed in Louisiana? If so, how can the parish get away with bulldozing habitat without jumping through a million hoops (other than the obvious answer)?

I don't remember their status in La. They are not protected in MS (Special concern). Anyway, I'm sure the road and highway people wouldn't have had any idea there was something special there. Somebody says "that creek under the bridge is too deep", or something like that, and Wham-O!

Now I'm sure there are millions of bluenose in these creeks, but very few places where a regular person can actually get to see them. It's pretty close quarters to start with, and then you have deadfalls, sticker bushes, etc., etc. to deal with. And the bluenose have a very specific microhabitat where they congregate.

I'm not sure what happened at site 2, but I suspect the hurricane altered the hydrology somewhat.

I hope to get a chance to check out some of the sites where welaka was historically found in MS, but have not been collected there for many decades. I have some pretty specific info, but I'm not sure these places even exist any more. Don't know if anybody's even looking there any more, if they do still exist. And there is at least one site I want to check out that was given to me by a reliable person, but I've never been to.

It's kind of a project of mine to keep an inventory of known welaka sites and monitor them from time to time. What I know for sure now is that there are two fewer sites than there were a few years ago.