The Most Important Day of the Year for Conservation Issues

Today, Election Day, is probably the most important day of the year for anyone concerned about conservation issues. Today is the day that each of us who are registered to vote have the ability to join together to shape the future debate on matters such as Smart Growth, protection of fisheries, endangered species preservation, and whether gas drillers should have to pay a tax on the volume of natural gas they produce (like they do in every state except Pennsylvania).

I think Election Day is pretty darn exciting. Aren't each of us somewhat honored when our peers ask for us our opinion about something (other than when telemarketers are doing surveys)? I love having the opportunity twice a year to go into a voting booth and cast my ballot for issues I think are important and for candidates who I think will champion the issues that I feel are important. 

Today is the day that each of us has the opportunity to go to the polls and vote for the candidate or candidates who are best aligned with our conservation ideals. How many people do you know who care deeply about environmental issues but fail to show up at the polls for every election? The percentages turnout of of registered voters vary by community around the country. In my municipality, it tends to range between 12-14%. Pretty poor.

I spent about an hour and a half this morning handing out campaign literature to voters arriving at a local polling station. I was hearing reports that turnout appeared to be pretty good (as of mid-morning) compared with recent general election years. The weather started out cold, but by midday now, it's party sunny and in the low 50's. So that could help boost turnout. It's sad that people in other countries would kill or die for the right to vote, and some of our own neighbors won't go vote if the weather seems inconvenient.

But I saw something this morning at the polling place that still has me scratching my head. Within 5 minutes of each other, I saw two cars pull in, each with a man and a woman. In both cases, the gentleman got out of the car and went inside to vote. Both women remained in their respective cars. One of them appeared to be doing her nails. The other one was reading a newspaper. These two women were 40 feet away from the door of the polling place, and they did not get out of the car and walk inside to vote. I don't get it.

It can be very time consuming and potentially frustrating to attend municipal and county commissioner meetings  a couple times a month to keep an eye on our elected officials and share our opinions with them. But two times a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, when we have the opportunity, the privilege, to cast our vote, why on earth would we not do so? Many folks complain that both major political parties have been taken over by extremists. That just means it's time for the average person to get out there to modulate who is getting elected to office. It's most crucial in local elections, because the local level is where the decisions are made that impact our daily lives. 

There are just under 7 hours remaining today to vote. If you have not done so yet, please get up, walk, bike, or drive to your polling place, and cast your vote. Because today is the day that your opinion matters the most.

Industrial-Scale Response to Save Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout

This is not a local conservation story like a lot of what I write.  But I think it's really a great story about trying to take back an ecosystem from an invasive species, so I wanted to spread the word to some of my readers who might not have heard about this project.  This tale should appeal to ecologists, anglers, and likely to anyone who marvels at the delicate balance that nature sets up and we humans knock down like a house of cards.

We've all got a stake in this invasive species project, because it involves a sparkling jewel in one of our national treasures.  The setting is Yellowstone Lake, in Yellowstone National Park, and the invasive species playing the part of the antagonist in this story is the lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush).  Most people, fishing enthusiasts included (particularly easterners like me), probably would not think of a lake trout as an invasive species in any North American lake, including Yellowstone Lake.  But as I learned just a few months ago when I stumbled onto this story, lake trout are not native to Yellowstone Lake.  And the National Park Service's effort to eradicate (yes, I said eradicate) them from Yellowstone Lake is far more than just a matter of ecological anal retentiveness.

The Problem

Lake Trout taken from Yellowstone Lake.
 (National Park Service photo)

Lake trout are believed to have been introduced to Yellowstone Lake in the mid-1980s.  The first recorded lake trout caught in Yellowstone Lake was in July 1994, and within weeks several more lake trout catches were documented by park rangers.  Lake trout are native to the northeastern U.S., the Great Lakes, and Canada.  They live in big lakes, because they require high levels of dissolved oxygen found in the cold depths of big lakes.  So Yellowstone Lake probably seemed like a logical location for an unwitting angler to surreptitiously introduce lake trout.

The problem with lake trout, which grow much larger than other trout species, is that they don't work and play well with other fish.  They are piscivores, meaning that they feed almost exclusively on other fish.  And that dietary preference has been bad news for the cutthroat trout native to Yellowstone Lake. 

Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout. (National Park Service photo)

Cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii) are a beautiful fish that we in the eastern U.S. have to go west of the Rocky Mountains to experience.  They get their name from the red slash of color along their lower jaw.  The ecologically cool thing about cutthroats is that, through geographic isolation in various major drainage basins throughout the western U.S., they have evolved into at least 10 distinct subspecies.  And Yellowstone Lake, the source of the famous Snake River that slithers through Idaho and eventually into the Columbia River in Washington, is home to the Yellowstone cutthroat subspecies (Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri).  This subspecies is found only in Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone River, and the uppermost Snake River. 

Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout. (National Park Service photo)

Yellowstone cutthroats are stream spawners.  That means that the cutthroats will leave Yellowstone Lake and swim up one of the lake's 126 tributaries when they get the urge to spawn.  During their spawning runs up the tributaries, cutthroats become an integral part of the the natural food chain as they become readily available to several other animal species:  white pelicans, osprey, river otters, and grizzly bears are some of the species most reliant on Yellowstone cutthroats.

Lake trout spawn deep in the lake, so they will never be present in the shallow parts of the lake or in the tributaries to be a dietary opportunity for their bird or mammal neighbors in the park.  The Park Service estimated in 2010 that the lake may have lost up to 99% of its spawning cutthroat trout because of predation by lake trout.  Not only did the introduction of lake trout into Yellowstone Lake deal a significant blow to the lake's cutthroats, the depletion of cutthroats rippled throughout the Yellowstone ecosystem to species that had depended on feeding on the cutthroats' spawning runs.  There were even reports of grizzlies coming down from the hills in search of food when they formerly would have been content in the upper reaches of tributaries chowing down on spawning cutthroats.  So the need for the Park Service to address the plummeting population of Yellowstone cutthroats was far more than an attempt to save an important sport fishery in a popular national park.  The balance of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem was threatened by the loss of native cutthroats.

The Solution (eventually, hopefully)
The National Park Service has been gill-netting lake trout in Yellowstone Lake since 1995.  The Service operates its own boat that deploys a chain of gill nets through areas that are known lake trout migration routes in the lake.  The nets, many set as deep as 150 to 160 feet and left in place for several nights, recover hundreds of mostly dead lake trout when pulled up.

The Park Service also contracts with a commercial fishing company that operates a trap-netting boat in the lake.  These trap nets are designed to recover the fish alive so that cutthroats that are caught along with the lake trout can be released.  It's estimated that about 50 lake trout are caught in the trap nets for every one cutthroat.

Whether the lakers are caught in the Park Service's gill nets or in the contractor's trap nets, all recovered lakers are killed, weighed, and sexed by Park Service staffers and student volunteers before having their air bladders punctured and being tossed overboard deep into the lake.  It's likely that trying to dispose of the huge volume of dead fish on land would soon create a solid waste headache that would attract bears like a moth to a flame.

Any lake trout caught by anglers in Yellowstone Lake are required to be killed by the anglers. Catch and release of lake trout is prohibited at Yellowstone.

Yellowstone fisheries program supervisor Todd Koel estimated that there were probably around 500,000 catchable lake trout in Yellowstone Lake this spring.  Contrast that number with an estimated 4 million cutthroats, at their peak numbers prior to the introduction of lake trout, in Yellowstone Lake and its tributaries.  Now, however, Koel estimates there may be only around 400,000 cutthroats in the lake and its tributaries, and those cutthroats continue to be preyed upon by the lake trout.

Results
The Park Service acknowledges that there is only a slight chance that lake trout can be eliminated from Yellowstone Lake, but experts think that aggressively removing large numbers of lake trout is feasible to keep their population in check in the lake.  According to a newspaper story last month from nearby Powell, Wyoming, last year's lake trout harvest totaled 224,000 fish, and this year's total was 274,000 lake trout killed by the cutthroat restoration program.  And the Park Service is looking at ways to kill lake trout eggs in their spawning beds to increase the program's effectiveness.

The Park Service had budgeted $1 million this year for the cutthroat restoration (ie. lake trout elimination) program.  That budget has been supplemented by an additional $1 million from the Yellowstone Park Foundation.  Other conservation organizations, such as the East Yellowstone Chapter of Trout Unlimited, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition are also stepping up to help out.

The kind of public/private collaboration that has come together to save the Yellowstone cutthroats has been reassuring, and the program's results over the past 18 summers have been encouraging.  And if I had to identify a take-home message from this story, I think it would have to be:  An ounce of education is worth a pound of cure.  In this situation, it is likely that anglers, ignorant of the effects of their actions, were the source of the original lake trout planted in Yellowstone Lake.  The resulting crash of the Yellowstone cutthroat population, after nearly 20 years of earnest restoration efforts, and tens of millions of dollars invested, could have been avoided if anglers had been better educated about the ecology of the sport of fishing that they presumably love.

Ecology is a science.  Whether we identify ourselves as anglers, exclusive fly fishers, conservationists, ecologists, or something else, we need to advocate for quality science education in our schools.  Science-savvy students grow up to be science-savvy adults who can be careful and effective stewards of our natural resources.

Conservation at a Turtle's Pace

I stumbled across story on-line yesterday about some folks who remove rattlesnakes from sites in northern Pennsylvania where gas companies are preparing to build well pads to drill into the Marcellus Shale for natural gas.  I guess venomous snakes are what it takes for some developers to be proactive in addressing impact to natural resources (or in this case, the impact from the snakes) at project sites.   But if site workers are not at risk for being bitten, it’s usually more difficult to get developers to be proactive about impacts to natural resources at project sites.

In this part of eastern Pennsylvania, it seems that the most common threatened or endangered species to look out for is the bog turtle (Clemmys muhlenbergii or Glyptemys muhlenbergii )).  I'm not saying that the turtle itself is common, but its range is in pockets throughout a large part of this and surrounding states.  On construction projects that require any kind of a federal permit (like an FCC permit for a cell tower installation) or require an actual environmental impact study, one of the first steps in the permitting process is to send an endangered species inquiry to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).  In the responses from the FWS, the bog turtle is often cited as a species of concern for projects in this neck of the woods (or this neck of the bog).

Bog Turtle.  From Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program Fact Sheet

The bog turtle is the smallest turtle found in Pennsylvania and is on the federal list of threatened species.  Quoting a boilerplate response letter from an inquiry to the FWS,  "The northern population of the bog turtle occurs in the states of Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hersey, Delaware, and Massachusetts.  Bog turtles inhabit shallow, spring-fed fens, sphagnum bogs, swamps, marshy meadows, and pastures characterized by soft, muddy bottoms; clear, cool, slow-flowing water, often forming a network of rivulets; high humidity; and an open canopy.  Bog turtles usually occur in small, discrete populations occupying suitable wetland habitat dispersed along a watershed … Some wetlands occupied by bog turtles are located in agricultural area and are subject to grazing by livestock."

So if any potential bog turtle habitat, as described above, is present within the area of a proposed project, the FWS requires a qualified wetland scientist to conduct a bog turtle survey (a survey in this case means a field inspection).  If the bog turtle survey confirms the presence of wetland conditions favored by the bog turtle, and if direct or indirect impacts to the wetlands in question cannot be avoided, a more detailed survey must be completed and submitted to the FWS.  Then if the detailed survey finds that bog turtles are within an area that will be disturbed, and if project activities might adversely affect the bog turtles, you can count on the project’s progress slowing down to a turtles’ pace.

When the presence of a 4-inch long turtle holds up any kind of project in which developers or politicians have money or reputation on the line, you’re going to hearing cursing and moaning about the “damned tree-huggers” and the “whacko environmentalists.”  However, I do not feel badly for their inconvenience.  Because,

Proper planning prevents poor performance.

That phrase doesn’t just apply to photocopier salesmen doing their homework before giving a presentation to a potential new client.  It also applies to stakeholders in projects in which an endangered species issue has the potential to change the project dynamics.  I’ll explain.

A couple months ago, I was in a meeting with a local government official discussing a request from a conservation organization for permission to access some municipally owned land to perform a natural resource survey as part of a state-wide natural resource inventory.  First of all, it’s public land, so, in my opinion, asking permission was unnecessary other than to massage the politician’s ego.  The unnamed official bristled at the suggestion that some environmentalist-type guy would go onto this municipal property and possibly find an endangered plant or animal.  He said, “If he finds something there, that’s going to tie our hands if we want to subdivide this property in the future and sell it off.”

Obviously, he and I have vastly different ideas of what it means to be a steward of municipally owned open space.  He was concerned that a bog turtle might turn up during the proposed survey and scuttle his plans to open even more of our community up to the rampant over-development that has made us the fastest growing municipality in Pennsylvania for the past decade or so.  So I then pointed out to him that by finding out now if there are any sensitive plant or animal species on the 84-acre parcel in question, any future plans for the parcel could proceed in an educated manner and avoid the delays associated with waiting until after the planning stages to do any necessary natural resource surveys.  To give the official a differing viewpoint, I added, “If we wanted to put in a walking and biking trail around the perimeter of the property, we could easily route the trail around any sensitive habitats that might be discovered now instead of having to re-route the trail while we are in the middle of construction.”  Plan now to prevent poor performance later.  The official grudgingly consented to allow the conservation organization to do the natural resource inventory on the municipal property.

We haven’t seen the results from the inventory of the property yet.  But I would be surprised if there were actually any bog turtles on that 84-acre parcel after having been plowed and planted for the past 150 or so years.  I don’t know if there are any threatened or endangered plants there either.  It would be nice if there were a few bog turtles or spade-footed toads there, because they might make it tougher for our local officials to try to liquidate an 84-acre natural asset like this parcel.  Unfortunately, it’s not easy for these local officials to grasp the concept that municipal open space is there for residents of our township to get out among nature and play, observe, enjoy.  Open space is not an inventory of real estate to be auctioned off to create more impervious surfaces, more runoff to streams, more traffic, and less quality of life.