Students study fish, culverts
Berry College boasts the nation’s largest campus, much of it wild land on either side of Lavender Mountain and beyond. It only seems fitting that the college also boasts enterprising faculty and students across a broad spectrum of environmental sciences and issues.
Students in assistant professor Zachary Taylor’s environmental sciences class have joined with researchers and volunteers of the Nature Conservancy to study the impact of drainage culverts on the migration of fish.
“The Nature Conservancy, working along with numerous other groups in the Southeast, are really honing in what we call fish passage,” said Katie Owens of the Nature Conservancy in Rome.
The research teams capture fish to identify the species living upstream and downstream of culverts across several watersheds in the Rome area to determine how much of an impediment to fish passage man-made culverts have become.
“What they’re concerned about is that a lot times fish can go down through a culvert but if there is erosion or steep drops the fish can’t get back up it,” Taylor said. “You’ve fragmented their habitat, chopped it up in little pieces.”
Owens said that often culverts are too small for the stream they serve, funneling an eight foot wide stream or creek through what may be a three or four foot wide culvert.
“It creates what we call scour pools,” Owens said. “When it gets to the bottom end of the culvert it’s plunging out and creates a pool over a time where fish, even in regular flow events, can’t move upstream or downstream because it has an eight or ten inch drop from the culvert into the stream.
The Berry students, Nigel Groce-Wright from Richmond, Virginia, Samantha Estes from Havertown, Pennsylvania, and John Patten Moss from Augusta,
are analyzing culverts in the Big Dry Creek (primarily on the Berry campus) and Armuchee Creek watersheds now.
“We’re not even a third of the way through the project,” Owens said.
Before spring break, students captured primarily sun fish from the Big Dry Creek watershed. Now they’re back, they’ll move to Armuchee Creek. “I expect we’ll get some great fish,” Owens said. “A variety of darters and shiners and sun fish, and I’m pretty sure we’ll also get some game species.”
Owens said a lot of the
fish are the really small fish, 2 to 3 inches in length.
“Those are the fish that are really at the bottom of the food chain, but they’re instrumental in the food chain and they’re the ones that are unable to move up and down stream at many of these sites.”
Student researcher Samantha Estes said though most of the fish have been small thus far, all are important to the ecosystem.
“They’re all essential to our rivers health, everything is connected,” Estes said. “We’ve found some shiners, I think even a river red horse. Some
we’re waiting on actual identification of.”
Estes said she is a volunteer at the Rome-Floyd County ECO River Education Center and is enjoying the project as a prelude to helping her decide what she actually wants to do with her environmental sciences degree.
Taylor said this batch of students will continue to work through graduation this spring, probably completing work on about ten culverts, and he hopes his classes will be continue the partnership with the Nature Conservancy for several semesters to come.