we had fun fishing for panfish and large schools of shiners were heading up river.
my wife kept a few fish for here tank a longer male and some kind of a shiner.
boy the snakes were out to! I will never get use to that!

Your minnow is a Cyprinella of some sort...and that is a beautiful little Longear Sunfish.

Your minnow is a Cyprinella of some sort...and that is a beautiful little Longear Sunfish.

thanks, i normaly try to only keep smaller ones for the tank.
buy the wife just had to keep it.you just gotta love the color in longers.
i have had better luck getting the smaller sunfish to change over to the pellet foods easier.

Edited by CATfishTONY, 04 July 2009 - 10:45 AM.

i have had better luck getting the smaller sunfish to change over to the pellet foods easier

probably because they dont have the live bait quite imprinted as much as the bigger ones do who have been around for years and eaten whatever they want, and not something that only drifts in the water Nice longear

Awesome Longear!

Brian

Your minnow is a Cyprinella of some sort...

And one with an attitude, even out of water he's sticking his tongue out at you!

And one with an attitude, even out of water he's sticking his tongue out at you!

NO ITS NOT! for some reason fish from the great Miami river have longated jaws and mouth and many sores
it takes weeks some times a month for fish to turn around at home in our tank. After that time period, some
make it to the home tanks others do not. Most of our fish we have at home come from small muddy areas with
weeds or back waters. Main stream river fish don't seem to live long, as bait or pets.

i love the longear

Unfortunately, the Great Miami is pretty polluted.
When I was an undergrad, I went fishing and caught a whole lot of large and small mouth bass in the Great Miami..
I saved two of them and brought them back to my dorm, cooked them and ate them.
I turned on the news and found out their was a benzene spill that day two miles upstream from where I caught them.
I did not fish the Great Miami again for over 10 years.
It is really a shame that it has become so polluted.
I can catch large numbers of channel catfish, shovelhead catfish, small mouth bass, large mouth bass, sauger, crappie and many types of sunfish minutes from my house in Dayton, but they are unsafe to eat.
Keith

Unfortunately, the Great Miami is pretty polluted.
When I was an undergrad, I went fishing and caught a whole lot of large and small mouth bass in the Great Miami..
I saved two of them and brought them back to my dorm, cooked them and ate them.
I turned on the news and found out their was a benzene spill that day two miles upstream from where I caught them.
I did not fish the Great Miami again for over 10 years.
It is really a shame that it has become so polluted.
I can catch large numbers of channel catfish, shovelhead catfish, small mouth bass, large mouth bass, sauger, crappie and many types of sunfish minutes from my house in Dayton, but they are unsafe to eat.
Keith

Yeah, you can simply look at the Great Miami and tell there is something wrong with it. The adjacent Little Miami and Whitewater Rivers on either side of the Great Miami are far more clean, they seem to have better species diversity as well.

Of course some waters are worse than others but I would assume at least mercury from large top level predators in just about any water in the USA.
General rule, limit to one meal per month, not to kids or child bearing woman, take smaller fish from lower on the food chain.
This is something I never thought about before but now have reason to think about long and hard.

The adjacent Little Miami and Whitewater Rivers on either side of the Great Miami are far more clean, they seem to have better species diversity as well.

...and the Mad River goes from supporting trout to barely supporting anything in all of a mile through Springfield. It's incredible to me.

Another problem I've noticed is substrate compaction. Those levees from Dayton upstream are great and all, and it's nice that the rivers aren't lakes like everywhere else... But the height of the water that's sustained during peak flooding precludes the benthos because they can't get into the substrate. In the few place near Sidney that I've sampled, I'd find that the riffles would be devoid of fish until I found some loose substrate and then BAM, there were fish. Compaction isn't such an issue once past Middletown, but unfortunately, it's got all the sins upstream along with it at that point.

Had to be an amazing looking stream back in the day with all that water percolating out of the tills. Probably had sculpin all the way down to the confluence with the Ohio. Wouldn't have had the productivity to have the richness or abundances like the Scioto, but it'd have been one big clear cold river, and that's always impressive.

Todd

Of course some waters are worse than others but I would assume at least mercury from large top level predators in just about any water in the USA.
General rule, limit to one meal per month, not to kids or child bearing woman, take smaller fish from lower on the food chain.
This is something I never thought about before but now have reason to think about long and hard.

After reading the posts in my thread i did a search.
i was unaware the water ways around here are in such bad shape.
as we go about our life we here this and that about spills and the like but i never new it was this bad.
i think i will eat less fish from the rivers from now on.i must say this info made me sad

http://www.epa.state...y/donoteat.html

And that's just the metals and pcb's. It doesn't even begin to address the sewage issues. We had proposed doing snorkel surveys for my grad work, since we'd be in some of Ohio and northern Kentucky's nicest streams. But upon looking at the coliform data and starting to think about getting everyone hepatitis shots, etc, we nixed it.

Columbus' wastewater is 90% of the Scioto's volume during low water. I'm sure the GMR is similar below Dayton.

I won't even bother getting into "channelization as a pollutant".

As much as I try to promote the natural history of Ohio, that natural history is never anything greater than relict communities. Some are more continuous than others, but even those are under threat.

Todd

And that's just the metals and pcb's. It doesn't even begin to address the sewage issues. We had proposed doing snorkel surveys for my grad work, since we'd be in some of Ohio and northern Kentucky's nicest streams. But upon looking at the coliform data and starting to think about getting everyone hepatitis shots, etc, we nixed it.

Columbus' wastewater is 90% of the Scioto's volume during low water. I'm sure the GMR is similar below Dayton.
Todd

Todd, having spent some time in the wastewater industry as well as volunteering to do the lab testing for a local river watch group, there's good news and bad news.

Good news is, modern built treatment plants properly designed and well regulated at state level produce effluent which rivals or exceeds many rivers' own conditions, frequently much better than most rivers of the past 200 years or so.
The effluent equaling 90% of flow is not uncommon. I actually worked at such a plant myself. The plant had been redesigned and upgraded according to stringent Ma surface discharge rules [based on but stricter than EPA]. They probobably sink a million a year into polishing their effluent, particularly phosphorus removal. The river for two or three miles below the plant supports trout. Below that, non-point source issues degrade H2O quality. Eventually it passes a 40 year old municipal plant and goes to hell.

Therein lies the bad news. Many, many plants are 30 or 40 years old, way behind in technology, grandfathered into all kinds of loop holes, and worst of all, not built to handle large capacities and a tendency to overflow into rivers during bad storms.
Also, some states are way behind the eight ball on getting to current to EPA regs and money issues of course tie their hands.

My experience with the lab work showed nitrogen, phosphorus, low DO and high colorform were consistent below a nearby old treatment plant, dramatically so after storm events. I would NOT snorkel within a mile of that plant, maybe more.
I also found non-point source contamination to be rampant. Many old septic systems are the likely culprit. Ma has aggressively strict regs on septic systems, frequently costing home owners $20,000 before they can sell their house, however many old systems have not been upgraded yet. The old fashion "camp" neighborhoods were particularly poorly planned in days of ignorance and of course they tend to be built on rivers and lakes.

Some places have pledged to use Obama $ for new treatment plants. My advice to anyone who votes in town elections to always support more $ for your local treatment plant, especially if it is a surface discharge plant.

And that's just the metals and pcb's. It doesn't even begin to address the sewage issues. We had proposed doing snorkel surveys for my grad work, since we'd be in some of Ohio and northern Kentucky's nicest streams. But upon looking at the coliform data and starting to think about getting everyone hepatitis shots, etc, we nixed it.

Columbus' wastewater is 90% of the Scioto's volume during low water. I'm sure the GMR is similar below Dayton.

I won't even bother getting into "channelization as a pollutant".

As much as I try to promote the natural history of Ohio, that natural history is never anything greater than relict communities. Some are more continuous than others, but even those are under threat.

Todd

Doesn't Ohio require Hep vaccines sometime around sophmore or junior year of college anyways? If research from every river was avoided because of pollutants work would never get done. Would I snorkel any part of the Cuyahoga, except maybe the extreme upper reaches, hell no, but the Rock Castle, Green, Licking, Kentucky rivers, etc. in Kentucky and all those Cumberland Plateau/Nasvhille Basin streams aren't exactly bacteria free gems. Have I had my share of ear infections, you bet...but I carry a variety of drops, antibiotics, vinegar, H2O2, silicone plugs, etc. and don't swallow water. That is why snorkels have purges. In general, the people I know that get sick from their work (giardia, bacterial/viral infection, mystery illness) don't keep themselves in good of shape as they should or did something careless like take a fall and gulp a bunch of water. Todd, is the fecal colliform any less safe then pulling a seine at 10X base flow after a tropical storms remnants pass through ?

Now keep in mind anything I write is never more than an incomplete thought

Mike, yeah, I agree that we have the technology, but it's underused. While I used Columbus as an example, the footprint of 90% of base amounts to about 4 miles of area devoid of unioinid mussels (which can be attributed in part to ammonia and hypoxic substrates). However, Circleville, a much smaller community by an order of magnitude, in spite of receiving water from Big Darby Creek, has about a 9 mile foot print of unio-less river. So yeah, I was cheatin' using big numbers, but that's what makes people think. And I think what's most frustrating is waiting for the money and priority to be generated / allocated.

And I'm not worried about hepatitis in those situations (although you'd never get me to put my face in that water), mouth is closed when I fall. The situations where one is going to unexpectedly get sick are more along which you mention in the non-point source issues of leaching septic systems, where the eutrophication isn't so present, but the disease is, and dilution via volume is not. That's where I get to Mattchew...

First of all, some of us haven't been immunized in 15 years Yeah, they say 25 years, but that's not exactly set in stone. And they advise boosters with repeated exposure.

The streams you mention have much lower population densities with much more favorable geology and hydrology than the streams I'm talking about (would you take a dive in Raccoon Creek? Or the Olentangy? What about the Little Miami?). And even though your list sounds more appealing, I'm awfully cautious about taking a snorkel in one of their tributaries because of the non-point source thing, again. Ear infections I can deal with. Hepatitis, dysentery, not so much. I'm inexplicably sick enough as it is

Todd