TENNESSEE VALLEY-In middle Tennessee, Shoal Creek’s clear waters rise chest-high above a limestone bedrock bottom.
It’s the perfect habitat for boulder darters.
Finger-long females hide clutches of eggs in rock crevices. Males guard the nests, a bulldog look on their tiny fish faces.
Yet few people have seen them.
Endangered boulder darters disappeared from Shoal Creek, which flowed into the Elk and then Tennessee rivers into Alabama, in the 1800s.
Today, experts from Conservation Fisheries Inc., with long-term funding and field support from the Tennessee Valley Authority and other partners, are bringing them back.
They’ve released 14,549 fish here since 2005.
It’s an ongoing conservation success story that TVA’s proud to help write.
“TVA works with partners like Conservation Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect and improve aquatic biodiversity,” said Shannon O’Quinn, TVA senior water resources specialist in charge of funding Natural Resources projects. “They’re doing something very few people in the world can do.”
“It’s pretty cool to reintroduce a fish 140 years after its disappearance,” Bo Baxter, Conservation Fisheries director and senior conservation biologist, said.
A boulder darter ready for release.
Swim Free, Fish
On a spring morning, Baxter and Conservation Fisheries biologist Shannon Murphy drove a cooler of boulder darters that had overwintered in the hatchery to Shoal Creek.
The males’ fins glowed green and the females’ bellies bulged with eggs.
Baxter and Murphy joined members of TVA’s Environment and Sustainability team, which funded the reintroduction and monitors river life across the Valley region.
They stepped into the water cradling four big bags of tagged fish, then waited in the shade of curdled-bark hackberry trees for the fish to acclimate.
“Normally we would be releasing 300 young fish, like we did last fall,” Baxter said. “But this release (of 28 young and 28 adults) is, in my mind, those fish plus however many eggs they carry.”
Murphy and Baxter gave the signal. The fish tipped into the current and swam free.
“It’s full circle,” a smiling Murphy said.
J.R. Shute, co-founder of Conservation Fisheries Inc., and Bo Baxter, current director, show off the rare smoky madtom at Conservation Fisheries Inc. in Knoxville.
Media Release/TVA RiverNews
