Free Flowing Stream Conservation Thread

[Al Agnew]

Sad how in some parts of the Ozarks, people are making the same mistake that put the gravel in the streams in the first place. It was wholesale logging and land clearing that did it back starting in the late 1800s and through the early 1900s. All the cleared land just wore out after a few years because it was too steep and rocky, and in the Great Depression lots of people just up and left because they couldn't make a living off the land they had. So it grew back up in timber, and now the next generation of owners is clearing it off again.

[Tim Smith]

Excellent point, Tim...and there's more to it than just people "needing" to harvest fish. This is skirting politics pretty close, but right now, with the great recession, the political climate is such that energy development and economic development are all-important and environmental protection is getting little but negative attention. And with the budget cutting going on, environmental inspection and enforcement is taking a huge hit, because staff is being cut. The MO DNR has always had a lack of inspection personnel...at the time I was on the gravel mining task force, there were only five people in DNR for the whole state that had responsibility for inspecting and investigating gravel mining. I'll bet there are fewer than that now. So Smalliebigs, you're probably right, they just don't have anybody to do anything about the Brazil Creek problems.

Totally correct. Start pulling apart enforcement and all the resources that are being used to protect or prop up our rivers just watch these systems start to unravel.

In some ways conservation goes against human nature and it's human nature that's the main problem.

For instance, its perfectly natural to own property. Animals have territories, people have territories. I believe in private property rights too, but as Al mentions, flowing water (and the sediment and pollution that goes into it) are property held in common. My gravel mining fills your habitat and my right to swing my fist stops at the end of your nose (or public fishery). All of these issues come to some degree from a violation of that principle.

It would be nice to imagine a sort of code of conservation chivalry where people just did the right thing. We've made a lot of progress over the last 50 years...

...but we aren't there yet by a long shot.

[exiledguide]

1 river otters

2 pollution

3 lack of access

[Justin Spencer]

river otters?

[Tim Smith]

river otters?

Predators always catch blame.

[smallmouthjoe]

Predators always catch blame.

It's never the human predator that catches the blame. It's not the riparian clearing or the gravel mining or the groundwater mining or the nutrient addition from us or our livestock, its the otters. I cant wait for the day when I can see a change in the attitudes toward predators.

[exiledguide]

It's never the human predator that catches the blame. It's not the riparian clearing or the gravel mining or the groundwater mining or the nutrient addition from us or our livestock, its the otters. I cant wait for the day when I can see a change in the attitudes toward predators.

Joe, I can only answer the survey with what I have observed over the last 40 years of smallmouth fishing and only on streams that I fished. They were the St Francis, Castor, Marble Creek, Meramac, Huzzah, Cortois and mainly the upper Big Piney from Simmons Ford down to Mineral Springs. Every year on the upper Big Piney smallmouth fishing had got better until the Otters were put in. I can only go by my experience, if you look at MDC website you willsee they finaly have admited that things didn't work out as planned. They will never admit they were wrong. Of course human beings are a big threat thats why we have laws and regulations to prevent and punish willful misdeeds. A river otter has to eat and there diet consist of crawfish and fish. Well I figure I'd get beat up about this, so whats new? Oh by the way, Riparian clearing, gravel mining etc. comes under the heading of pollution.

[Stoneroller]

well i've learned something about gravel mining. gonna have to look into that some more, I never realized it is as widespread as it seems. I figured we were talking about the gravel pits along the sides of the river like the one near lone elk park. learn something new everyday.

i would like to add that river otters were/are a natural part of the ecosystem and if weren't for humans screwing it all up and taking what isn't theirs and destroying what's left, there'd be plenty of river and fish to go around for the otters and the humans.

[ozark trout fisher]

It's never the human predator that catches the blame. It's not the riparian clearing or the gravel mining or the groundwater mining or the nutrient addition from us or our livestock, its the otters. I cant wait for the day when I can see a change in the attitudes toward predators.

I am in agreement there. Any damage to fish populations that otters have done is insignificant alongside cattle, gravel mining, dams, channelization, atvs, and all the other fun things we do to ruin our watersheds.

And who says that Otters are any less important, than say, smallmouth bass? Just because you can't fish for them doesn't make them any less valuable. They are an important part of Ozark stream ecosystems, and it doesn't matter whether they are convenient for us as fisherman.

[Al Agnew]

The otter thing is interesting, to say the least. There are streams that are full of otters and full of fish, and it appears that in those streams the otters are having little effect on the fish. But there are undeniably streams that appear to have been decimated by otters. Why some streams and not others?

Perhaps it's the amount of wintering habitat. Warm water game fish like smallmouth are easiest for an otter to catch in the winter, especially on streams that are less spring fed and colder. The fish are sluggish, the otters aren't. If the stream is fairly small, the wintering pools are small, and the otters can go in and really do a number on the fish in a wintering pool. Streams filling in with gravel don't help, either, reducing the amount and quality of wintering habitat.

I have hopes that we've seen the worst of the otter impacts, and that the otters and fish will reach an equilibrium, like any species and their food base. We saw an unbelievable explosion of otters when they were first introduced. You can say MDC should have known, but we were seeing otter reproduction rates in Missouri that were far in excess of anything in the scientific literature. I don't know where you get that MDC would never admit they were wrong...they have admitted over and over that there were unforeseen repercussions from the otter reintroduction, due to the reproductive rate and the speed in which they spread from the original stockings.