first Mudpuppy Night

[Fred Schueler]

Everyone,

Last night (20h06-20h43, air 6°C, clear & calm, water very murky, 10°C,
flow 0.303 cubic metres/second, 16% of the average 1.86 cubic
metres/second from the RVCA graph) Payton McIntyre, Douglas Strick, & I
did an initial Mudpuppy Night.

We mostly saw mats of algae growing in last summer's carpet of
drought-killed Moss all across the flats, overlaid by sheets of fallen
leaves. There was, of course, no chance of Mudpuppies being active in
these conditions, but there were plenty of hard-to-identify fish in the
murky water (a couple of netted small Rock Bass identified), Gyrinid
Beetles scattered all over, adequate numbers of Green Frogs & Bull Frogs
(mostly small), and tadpoles. We saw only a few live Crayfish, and no
signs of recent predation on Crayfish.

Conditions met our Oxford Mills definition of drought (all the flow
coming through the cracks between the logs rather than over the
spillway), and if the drought is broken by forecast rain there will be a
huge flush of fixed carbon going downstream from the algae and leaves,
and conditions may be very different next week.

fred.
------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
2024 annual letter: https://clt1233162.bmeurl.co/11E63979
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
------------------------------------------------------------