River monsters

A big-river specialist

OK, that was just to catch my students' eyes.  They're addicted, and we do hope to do some big fish work on the Tombigbee this summer.  What I want to talk about here though is not the size of the fish, but the size of the rivers.  A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment looks at the prospects for saving big-river specialist fish, those guys that are dependent on big waters like the Mississippi.  The authors looked at distribution patterns of big-river specialists in the Mississippi basin, and found that moderately sized tributaries, those with 166 cubic meters per second, support 80% or more of the basin's 68 big water lovers.

This could be significant for conservation efforts.  There's little that can be done to restore natural conditions to the nation's major rivers.  Perhaps we would be better served to aim some conservation dollars toward these all-important tributaries.

FYI, that 166 cubic meter per second threshold is slightly in excess of 5,000 cubic feet per second (unfortunately, those are the default units on NOAA's hydrologic data reports, like those here).  If I've done the math right, the Tombigbee at Dempolis has a flow rate, at the moment, in the area of 8,000 cfs - that's about 225 cubic meters per second.