A Plea For The Nomadic Paddlefish

October 14, 2004

Release from: Daily Herald (Chicago)

Leave it to Craig Springer to focus on the more unusual aspects of our nation's fisheries.

Springer is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Aside from being in the office, he frequently traverses small streams in New Mexico and Arizona in search of things to keep himself occupied.

Springer will call or e-mail me at least a couple of times a week, asking me if I'd like to do a story on the elusive paddlefish. His persistence cannot be ignored, because he makes a good case for just about everything he presents.

When coal beds still were forests and ferns, paddlefish swam the inland waters of North America. This odd-looking, ancient big fish has survived 350 million years here, since the Devonian period.

Springer noted that when one looks at a map of the fish's habitat range it might remind the observer of veins on a leaf.

The paddlefish lives in big rivers from Montana to Louisiana, all across the Mississippi basin. When you overlay the artificial political boundaries over the dendritic pattern, you can readily see why there's a need for coordinated management of a big river behemoth that wanders the countryside.

And travel they do.

A paddlefish tagged at Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery in Yankton, S.D., took a trip down the Missouri River, then up the Kaskaskia in Illinois, where commercial fishermen caught it. Fish tagged in Texas have been caught by shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana shoreline.

That's where the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association (MICRA) comes into play. MICRA is an association of 28 state fish and game agencies, native American tribes, and federal agencies in the Mississippi basin that exists solely to promote effective management of natural resources, including the paddlefish.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist Jerry Rasmussen is MICRA's coordinator.

"A coordinated effort is absolutely essential," Rasmussen said, "to manage a fish like the paddlefish that crosses multiple jurisdictions."

Part of that help comes in the form of database management.

Biologists at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Columbia and Carterville Fisheries Resources Offices located in Missouri and Illinois keep up the National Paddlefish Database.

Launched in 1995, it's a central data storehouse of paddlefish tagging studies from across the Mississippi basin.

It's the biggest fish-tagging project of its kind in an inland water system, and the results have led to a new understanding about paddlefish habitat, behavior and movement.

Following a fish from the young age when it's tagged to the advanced age when it's recaptured has yielded important information, such as trends in growth rates, condition of fish and population sizes over time. The database also helps state fish and game agencies to develop informed paddlefish management plans.

Those plans often call for augmenting rivers with hatchery-reared paddlefish to offset the damage caused by dams that block spawning migrations.

But what would a success story be without a downside?

Of course, I'm referring to the greed aspect. Poachers in the illegal caviar trade have a major impact on the paddlefish's plight. In light of this thievery, a number of federal and state hatcheries are trying to replenish the paddlefish in its native waters.

Paddlefish populations in the upper Missouri River have benefited from Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery, working with state fish biologists from South Dakota and Nebraska.

They raise about 25,000 15-inch long paddlefish each year. In the southern states, Mammoth Spring National Fish Hatchery in Arkansas and Private John Allen National Fish Hatchery in Mississippi rear large numbers of paddlefish that go into the White River system in Arkansas and the Tombigbee and Mississippi rivers in Tennessee.

Tishomingo National Fish Hatchery in Oklahoma has returned paddlefish to waters above dams on the Arkansas, Red and Verdigris rivers, in some cases where they were absent for a half-century.

Natchitoches National Fish Hatchery in Louisiana spawns paddlefish from the Mermentau River and Bayou Nezpique. Working in concert with the Booker Fowler State Fish Hatchery, young fish are divvied up, grown out and planted in formerly occupied waters in Louisiana.

It can be a long-distance affair for paddlefish - that is, their need to find the right habitat to spawn.

Swimming 200 miles in a month is not unheard of, and over the course of the fish's 30-year life span, they can cross those artificial boundaries that lay over their large range a number of times.

To do an effective job, biologists need the coordinated management facilitated by MICRA and the National Paddlefish Database.