A River or Stream near You

Greetings fellow Bio 105 bloggers, and welcome to my Virtual Field Trip Lab. I hope the information provided is enlightening, interesting, entertaining -and at least somewhat enjoyable-; all of that said, let's begin.

Some information about my river:

For this assignment, I combed through a few websites on rivers in Arizona proper and came across one I'd never previously heard of, the Little Colorado River to be precise. According to Google Maps (prefers to be cited simply as maps.google.com) the Little Colorado River joins it's closest neighbor the Colorado River approximately 208 miles from m front door, and is located (primarily) in the Grand Canyon National Park on the northern end of central Arizona. The River Starts at the northern flank (side) of Mount Baldy near the Arizona New Mexico border at approximately 10,000 feet in two forks; both of these forks join near the town of Greer, Arizona and form the Little Colorado River (Wikipedia Commons). The river empties into the Colorado River at an intersection within the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona, which of course empties into the Gulf of California.

That's all well and good, but who runs it?

Good question. The hardest part of this assignment by far was trying to figure out just which organization manages this particular stretch of waterway. The Colorado River itself is well documented (and argued over historically) but this river -again being rather long- seems to also have quite a range of managers, activists, and capitalists, all wanting to call some part of it theirs. For the sake of simplicity and let's face it, your free time, I'm just going to pretend the river (or the segment I'm talking about) is completely managed by the Colorado River Agency, and the Arizona Game and Fish Department. The prior is actually partially true, the latter I only threw in because they have some pretty incredible plans and experiments they use to try to improve the Colorado itself. I couldn't really get a whole lot of information about a specific mission, but if anyone seems to be trying to do some real good for our gilled pals, I'd say it's these folks (in this case). Over the last ten years they have produced exhaustive studies trying to figure out how to bring up the numbers of indigenous animals, while safely reducing the numbers of non-indigenous fish. In fact, the AZGFD ran an experiment to mechanically remove non-native fishes in the Colorado (azgfd.gov) at the dams (if I read the research properly).

Although I did not visit the site myself, I've chosen and captioned a few pictures for example and your amusement:

Here is an amazing view of a set of falls that are found along the final western curve of the Little Colorado River
-Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons-

This is a picture of what I think I would look like at the Little Colorado River. Mind you I would be the guy on the shore because for some silly reason I never learned to swim.
-Courtesy of Tripadvisor.com-

A Big List of Fishes:

There are some pretty neat fish in this particular region of Arizona's waterways (many of which I'd never heard of). I want to make a semi visual guide of the fish, so I'm going to break them up into indigenous, non-indigenous, and endangered, please enjoy. 

Indigenous fish include:

The Humpback Chub (Gila cypha) 

Razorback Sucker (Xyrauchen texanus)

Colorado Pikeminnow (Ptycocheilus lucius)  (AKA a giant minnow!)

Non-Indigenous fish found in the area:

The Channel Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)

Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

Brown Trout (Salmo trutta)

Finally, the endangered fish of my local region,Yavapai County: *sad face in advance for the giant minnows*

Colorado  Pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus Lucius) (largest American minnow up to 6 feet and 80 lbs!) 

Desert Pupfish (Cyprinodon Macularius) 

Gila Chub (Gila Intermedia)  

Gila Topminnow (Poeciliopsis Occidentalis Occidentalis) 

Loach Minnow (Tiaroga Cobitis) 

Above information courtesy of: http://www.gcdamp.gov/keyresc/nf.html, http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/arizona/Documents/CountyLists/Yavapai.pdf. 

Above Images courtesy of:  http://www.dec.ny.gov/images/fish_marine_images

Why Native Fish Are Important (and everything else for that matter): 

After that awesome visually assisted fish list, I'm forced to touch on a more serious note -don't worry it won't be long or preachy-: Native fish are a lot more important that you may think. While nature has endured (with and without our help) many extinctions and evolutions, those processes take time. If a species was rooted out for being -frankly- bad at life, it would be killed off over a period of many years, allowing that biome to, "balance out," in a sense. When a population of any fish -or animal really- is killed off suddenly, the results can be catastrophic. Picture a food chain with me: You have big predator fish A and B, who eats smaller carnivorous fish C through I, who eat herbivore J through S, which eat plant T through Y,  all of which nourish the bottom feeders in group Z that eat what we'll call "Z+" -never forget the bottom feeders-. These letters aren't chosen at random, they are intended to be -somewhat- representative of the dispersion of food sources in small bodies of water. Now, imagine we kill off predator fish A. That could likely result in an over population of the smaller carnivorous fish C through I, which in turn may severely diminish or entirely eradicate herbivore J through S, leading to an over population of plants T through Y, which in their overgrowth, stop up the flow of the river, and then it's all in the ... well "Z+." Scenario B is much simpler, what if you kill off group Z, the bottom feeders? Unless your body of water is moving, this could once again be a catastrophe, because much like humans, fish don't live well in concentrated ... "Z+." This all sounds quite glib I'm sure, but the point is serious. A lot of people modernly like to take the stance of, "well it's just one stupid fish," but that's like pulling a random card out of a deck and hoping to still win a game of solitaire. You might luck out and pull a Joker, heck you might pull two of them, but there's an infinitely higher chance that you are going to pull the wrong card, and the game could very well be over. This is a little extremist perhaps, but you never know how big or small a ripple effect will be, and it's probably wise to not risk it.

A couple neat things I learned during this project:

I realize that in writing there is often no way to convey a tone of sincerity, but in this case I must assure my sincerity. 

First: I had literally no clue how many types of minnows there are. I know a good deal about oceanic life, but apparently next to nothing about fresh water fish, even ones in my own back yard – so to speak-.

Also: I didn't even know there was a little Colorado river until this assignment. I looked around and saw that many of my classmates had done many of the more popular rivers, but found some preliminary information about this one on a geotag explorer website that happened to mention it. Apparently floating down the river is quite the experience –although I’ll probably never know as I have an astute fear of water I can’t see the bottom of-.

Two new questions I formed while writing this out:

This part is incredibly easy. First: Why in all the seven hells is it not easier to find out who manages a body of water? It seems like this should be well published for an array of reasons. What if you saw something important and needed / wanted to report it?

Second –and I intend to look into this- are all the rivers in Arizona relatively –Earth years not human years- old? I noticed while looking for a river to write about that many of them are in gorges and canyons. Most of the rivers I've seen outside the southwest of the USA seem to be more “surface level” I suppose. Either way, interesting stuff.

Okay, so I lied and there are two difficult parts of this assignment:

I know what you're thinking, and you're right, I am a terrible person. Lying is unacceptable, and I feel terrible for engaging in it (or you can read that as: I accidentally skipped this part entirely and then spent several hours trying to write it).

I did watch Mayor Von Gausig's videos (who knew Mayors did anything but golf?) and while I've been to the Verde River on several occasions, I've not yet been to the Little Colorado, so I did what I could. I hope the following isn't too dry, as I've tried really hard to keep the spirit of this assignment pretty light, fun, and easy reading. 

Let's start with the differences: The Little Colorado is 507 km long, and pushes 400 cubic feet of water per second (although that number fluctuates dramatically during different seasons). The river is home to trees more common to the northern end of Arizona such as fir, spruce, pines, and the like; and provides a habitat to a handful of turtles, frogs, and many fish (as seen above). The Verde river runs just 270 km long, but pushes a significantly higher 602 cubic feet of water per second. In accordance with the regional difference between the two rivers locations, the Verde is home to a much more varied array of plants such as sycamore, willows, cattails, reeds, walnut trees, etc; and a surprisingly varied range of animals, including frogs, turtles, and fish as well. 

Now some fun similarities: Both are home to Otters(!). This literally blew my mind for some reason, out of all the animals I saw listed (muskrats, heck even beavers and bears) this one really surprised me. I'm sure I'm showing how indoorsy I am, but for some reason when I think Otter, I'm not picturing rivers in Arizona. Anyway, both rivers are celebrated spots for recreation, including areas for kayaking, rafting, and inter-tubing. Both allow sport fishing during their granted seasons with appropriate licensing. After a little further research I learned that both are actually relatively clean according the the census (links at the bottom of the citation list) especially in lieu of how many people visit each yearly. Of all the similarities I could list, there was one that I found more important that any other: They are both home to the freshwater behemoth, known as Ptychocheilus Lucius... AKA the Colorado Pikeminnow. I'm sorry, I really couldn't help bringing this thing up again, 80 lbs of minnow is no joke. Honestly there are a few other varieties of Chub and Minnows that are found in both rivers, I just really wanted to highlight that one.

A quick closing note:

I hope anyone who took the time to read this post learned something other than Giant Minnows are real, and Otters live in Arizona. I hope instead that you as a reader soaked up some of my fish A through Z madness, it really is important stuff. Anyway, that's it for now, and I wish you all the best of luck this semester and beyond.

Citations: (I hope I'm doing enough by simply listing the pages. I specifically used .gov sites and creative commons to avoid any possibility of using private party or copyrighted material).

http://www.azgfd.gov/w_c/research_mechanical_removal.shtml

http://www.fws.gov/nevada/protected_species/fish

http://www.pima.gov/cmo/sdcp/species/fsheets/gc.jpg

http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/arizona/Documents/CountyLists/Yavapai.pdf

http://www.dec.ny.gov/images/fish_marine_images

http://www.gcdamp.gov/keyresc/nf.html

http://www.azgfd.gov/w_c/research_mechanical_removal.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Colorado_River

http://gacc.nifc.gov/swcc/dc/azphc/swalma.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verde_River

https://maps.google.com/

http://www.azwater.gov/AzDWR/StatewidePlanning/WaterAtlas/CentralHighlands/Water/VerdeRiver.htm

http://www.azwater.gov/AzDWR/StatewidePlanning/WaterAtlas/EasternPlateau/Water/LittleColoradoRiver.htm