Archives for November 2014

Ancient, eel-like fish plays crucial role in river ecology

“Lampreys are delightfully bizarre fish — and vastly underappreciated for the role they play…in ecosystems.” Center for Biological Diversity

Pacific lampreys are ancient animals, emissaries from the Paleozoic era. For 500 million years, these eel-like fish evolved and adapted, inhabiting the Columbia River and its tributaries in numbers too vast to count. In the past century, however, these tenacious survivors have been on a steep slide toward extinction.

For too long, lampreys have been overlooked, overshadowed by the majestic Chinook that shares its waters. The lowly lamprey is, admittedly, an oddity of nature. Blind and nocturnal in their early years, juvenile lampreys leave snaky tracks on the river bottom when foraging at night — their only visible sign after disappearing again into the sediment at daybreak. After migrating to sea, where they grow from pencil-length to yardstick-length, they return upstream to spawn. With powerful suction cups for mouths, they can climb waterfalls by repeatedly sucking onto the slippery rock face and jumping upward, sometimes ascending hundreds of vertical feet. They also use their suckers to pick up and move large stones to build their redds (spawning nests). Another ancient feature: the lamprey has no jaw. In fact, it has no bones at all. Without bony skeletons, their bodies can swell and shrink to withstand the vagaries of life cycle and food supply. They can plump up hugely to accommodate an egg sac of 100,000. And they can shrivel down to practically nothing when food is scarce.

This biological bizarreness may have blinded humans to the ecological importance of these creatures — at least until recently. As Pacific lamprey populations have plunged, scientific interest has risen, according to Carl Schreck of Oregon State University.

“Thirty-five years ago when I started my career, there were zero papers on lamprey presented at meetings of the American Fisheries Society,” says the fisheries biologist. “These days, there are whole symposiums on lamprey.”

Now scientists have turned their attention toward the Marys River. As part of a three-year study in the Willamette River Basin, a team led by Schreck and OSU research biologist Lance Wyss is conducting surveys to estimate abundances of lamprey and characterize their habitat in the Marys mainstem, as well as other tributaries of the Willamette River. Of these, the Marys shows the lowest number of redds from spawning surveys. “There appears to be a shortage of spawning habitat in the Marys,” Wyss suggests, but acknowledges that it is too early in the study to say for sure.

Spawning habitat in many Northwest rivers, including the Marys, was lost last century when the streams were channelized (straightened) to reduce flooding on farmlands. Diminished were the curves and eddies where waters pooled, where silts and sands settled, and where fish rested. Without this natural “channel complexity,” a river’s fast-flowing waters scour out the cobbles and gravel beds that lamprey need for egg-laying. These cobbles and gravel beds happen to be the same ones salmon need for their egg-laying.

But spawning beds are only part of the picture of lamprey decline. To uncover other factors harming the fish, the researchers are looking at pharmaceuticals accumulating in sediments, industrial chemicals polluting streams, dams blocking passage upstream — basically “the whole shebang,” in Schreck’s words. “Whatever’s bad for lamprey is bad for salmon, and vice versa,” he observes.

This mutualism might seem contradictory, given that lamprey are parasites that attach themselves to salmon and suck their blood (another trait that fails to endear lamprey to humans). But ecosystem dynamics are always infinitely more complex on deeper analysis than they are at first glance. Turns out, lampreys are scrumptious, fat-filled delicacies for salmons’ principal predators. A sea lion, for instance, will eat 30 lampreys for every salmon it devours, according to Schreck and Wyss.

The ancient lamprey holds a place of high honor for another ancient population: the tribes that sustained themselves for countless generations on the Columbia River Plateau and along the watersheds that are drained by the mighty river. Lamprey, which once ran thick in the swift waters, were a critical food source between salmon runs. The tribes called lamprey “the food of the hunger months,” Schreck says. It is these tribes — the Umatilla, the Warm Springs, the Grand Ronde, the Siletz — that are spearheading much of the lamprey research through the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

The tiny Oregon chub makes a big comeback

There’s a species of minnow that teetered on the brink of extinction. Hardly anyone noticed — except a handful of fisheries biologists determined to save the fish, known as the Oregon chub.

Now, the chub is back. Two decades after the chub landed on the Endangered Species List, it once again swims throughout the Willamette River Basin in healthy numbers.

Back when the Willamette River and its tributaries wandered across the landscape in gentle curves and complex braids, the Oregon chub was plentiful. In those days, the rivers freely topped their banks when Oregon’s rains raged, filling marshes and regenerating wetlands. The chub thrived in those slack waters, which were filled with aquatic vegetation and cover for hiding and spawning. Tens of thousands of the sardine-sized fish flashed silvery in the quiet waters of beaver ponds, in the slow channels of oxbows, and in the rich habitats of backwater sloughs all the way from Oregon City to Oakridge.

But as the early settlers began to farm the fertile floodplains, to dam and dike and drain, to coerce the free-flowing waters to stay within the bounds of man-made channels, the chub’s native habitat shrunk. At the same time, non-native species like large-mouth bass, sunfishes and bullheads were invading the river and its tributaries, eating the little fish and out-competing them for habitat. By 1992, the Oregon chub was officially declared endangered.

Thanks to the all-out efforts of biologist Paul Scheerer and his colleagues at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon State University, the chub has rebounded in the Willamette Basin, including the Marys River drainage. To rebuild the populations, the scientists introduced the chub into new reaches of the river system, often on private lands under voluntary “Safe Harbor” agreements with landowners. They also discovered new populations in places where the chub had never been documented before. Several ponds at Finley National Wildlife Reserve hold the core populations in the Marys River Watershed.

In 2010, its status was upgraded from “endangered” to “threatened.” The hope is to take the fish off the list altogether.

That isn’t to say all is well for the tiny fish.

“Individual populations remain at risk due to the loss of suitable habitat and the continued threats posed by the proliferation of non-native fishes, illegal water withdrawals, accelerated sedimentation, and potential chemical spills or careless pesticide applications,” writes Scheerer and co-authors Brian Bangs and Shaun Clements in a recent report.

Planting Wildflowers and Freeing Oak Bringing Back Prairie Habitat

“There’s one!” calls a tall guy in an olive-drab raincoat. Slowly, gingerly, several members of the group step through the wet wildflowers toward the place where he’s pointing. There sits a tiny butterfly, no bigger than an inch from wingtip to wingtip. Digital cameras emerge from jacket pockets to capture the pale, bluish insect, nearly camouflaged on a pale, bluish blossom, the Kinkaid’s lupine, upon which the butterfly depends for sustenance throughout its lifecycle.

The tiny winged creature is a member of an endangered species — the Fender’s blue butterfly — newly emerged from its pupa and collecting nectar on a wildflower that is itself becoming more and more scarce.

Getting a glimpse of the rare butterfly is a testament to the success of a long-term, multiagency project to restore native grasslands in the rural community of Wren. For the 15 people taking the Watershed Council’s Memorial Day prairie restoration tour, the Fender’s blue sighting confirms the soundness of the presentations by scientists, landowners and local consultants who are on hand to show off the results of nearly a decade of restoration efforts in the gently rolling hills along the Marys River. The multi-phase project — led by the Watershed Council and the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in collaboration with a number of landowners, Oregon State University and other partners — aims to reclaim the oak woodlands and flower-studded grasslands that have been lost to agriculture, fire suppression and conifer encroachment over the past 150 years.

“Huge Changes” Afoot

Kate McGee has seen “huge changes” on the acreage where she and Scott Lesko have been “freeing” oaks, eradicating thistle, and planting lupine since 2008. “We’ve seen things we’ve never seen here before, like acorn woodpeckers,” she says. “I saw an Ana’s swallowtail lay an egg on a lomatium (a native wildflower).”

McGee stands beside the meadow listening as Lesko tells the prairie tourists the couple’s personal restoration story: cutting dozens of Douglas firs to let sunlight reach the native white oaks. Spraying harmful invasive weeds that were choking off wildflowers. Hovering over the reclaimed meadow with the anxious concern of a new parent. She looks at the blue flags dotting a stand of fescue to mark the lupine starts and thinks about how far she and Lesko have come under the Watershed Council’s guidance.

“The Kincaid’s looks like it’s really settled in,” she says with satisfaction. “I feel fortunate to be a part of this.”

Sowing Wild Seeds

Henry Storch is a familiar presence in Wren, traveling the back roads in a dusty truck advertising his farrier service. But shoeing horses is just one of his trades. He keeps bees, too. And he sells native seeds. He knows wildflowers backwards and forwards, which puts him in high demand for the restoration projects underway in Wren.

Walk around Wren with Storch – whose grandmother taught him Latin at age 4 — and within minutes he’ll have your head spinning with flowers, bees, and random bits of horticultural information: Rose checkermallow (“a nice native”). Callicordis (“primo nectar for the Fender’s and the Taylor’s checkerspot”). English plantain (“the principle host for the Taylor’s). Camas (pretty basic). Bombus mixus (“a cavity nester”). Wyethia (“native sunflower”). Vetch (non-native, but functional for pollinators. Bombus Californicus. Lupinus organus (“a hybrid species with a really stinky smell).

As manager of the Watershed Council’s Nectar Network project, he has sown thousands of seeds in dozens of meadows. One of these meadows sits next to Lumos Winery off Cardwell Hill Road. Formerly owned by Lumos, the meadow was sold to Benton County in 2007 to help save the Fender’s blue. This critical habitat is home to one of the biggest remaining populations of the butterfly.  Based on studies suggesting that the Fender’s blue is hesitant to fly into shaded woodlands, the Watershed Council has taken out stands of conifers that divide one meadow from another. Creating corridors from one grassland to another creates a more robust population of butterflies with greater genetic diversity, explains Karen Fleck-Harding, the landowner outreach coordinator for the Council. Adds Storch: “We have these little pockets of habitat, but they’re not that valuable if they don’t get connected together.”

Wildlife Abounds

Fleck-Harding points out a cluster of finger-like foliage in the dewy meadow. “The Kinkaid’s lupine holds a drop of water in the center of its leaves like a crystal,” she says. Wild iris is growing there there, too, along with a stridently yellow wildflower called Oregon sunshine. Wild strawberries peak from the greenery, red and plump and irresistible to the humans walking among them. “Strawberries surviving out here means there’s not a lot of competition from tall grasses,” says Fleck-Harding. “It’s an indicator of a healthy meadow.”

Among the landowners Fleck-Harding has worked with is Susan Smith. Every day, Smith walks out to the field where she and her husband are waiting for the Fender’s blues to find their newly bloomed lupine. She hasn’t seen one yet this year. But she has seen more wildlife since they started their restoration, including pileated woodpeckers on Doug firs de-limbed to create oak habitat, now serving as wildlife snags. “We used to have just a thicket out here,” says Smith. “Now we have two nice oak woodlands. It’s really pretty. It was exciting to find out that we have something worth saving and preserving — that we could contribute to saving the butterflies and help protect the area for years to come.”