Robust Redhorse swims again below Lake Jackson dam

Posted 7:56AM on Saturday 12th January 2002 ( 23 years ago )

JACKSON - A decade after being discovered as a distinct species, the robust redhorse is swimming again in a 19-mile stretch of the Ocmulgee River below Lake Jackson. State and federal agencies and Georgia Power Co. signed an agreement on the riverbank Friday to help preserve the redhorse, a member of the sucker fish family that all but vanished from Georgia rivers in the late-1800s but re-emerged in small numbers in the Oconee River in 1991. Representatives of the utility company, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Georgia's Wildlife Resources Division gathered at a boat ramp below the Lloyd Shoals Dam to watch scientists unload about 3,100 juvenile fish, whose scientific name is Moxostoma robustum, into the Ocmulgee. Another 900 fish, now being tagged, soon will join the others, said Mike Harris of the state Department of Natural Resources. The half-pound fish, bronze with red fins and tails, should find shelter from predators such as the flathead catfish and plenty to eat in that stretch of the Ocmulgee, Harris said. The river also has gravel shoals where the redhorse likes to spawn. For its part of the effort, Georgia Power won't have to change the flow of water coming through Lloyd Shoals Dam, which impounds Lake Jackson. Mike Nichols, environmental laboratory manager for the company in Smyrna, said the utility has spent more than $1 million to help pay for research on the robust redhorse and will spend $300,000 more in the next 15 years. The conservation agreement outlines Georgia Power's responsibilities for protecting the fish habitat. It also guarantees the robust redhorse will not be listed as federally endangered as long as Georgia Power keeps up its end of the bargain. Jimmy Evans, a state fisheries biologist whose research helped restore the fish to its historic habitat, said its decline most likely was due to silty runoff from cotton plantations that buried the gravel spawning beds. ``They were described by a famous 19th century naturalist, Edward Cope, in 1869 but after that, there's nothing in the literature,'' Evans said. In 1991, Evans found eight redhorses in the Oconee River between Milledgeville and Dublin. ``This fish was something we'd never seen before,'' he said. Evans eventually contacted ichthyologist Bob Jenkins at Roanoke College, Va., the world's leading authority on the redhorse genus. Jenkins concluded the redhorse found by Evans was a scientifically undescribed and unnamed species. He suggested using ``robust'' as a specific name, in part because of the fish's stocky body. In 1995, fishery biologist Greg Looney with the federal Fish and Wildlife Service began collecting pregnant redhorse females from the Oconee's small population and raising the resulting fry in hatcheries. ``We've probably hatched a million fry by now,'' Looney said. ``But until we learned more about rearing them, we lost a lot.'' Since then, thousands of young robust redhorses have been released back into the Oconee as well as into the Savannah River below Augusta, where another small population was discovered.

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