When you hear about millions of dollars being handed out to help protect endangered species, your mind might go to the African savannah or Yellowstone National Park where iconic species inhabiting the endangered list dominate the landscape. Certainly, their protection is important and costly at that. But even small species can play a pivotal role in any ecosystem and furthermore, drastically affect human activity.
Enter the speckled pocketbook mussel. This freshwater species grows no more than 3 1/2 inches long and can only be found in the Little Red River drainage system in north-central Arkansas. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s resident malacologist, Kendall Moles, said they’re an important contributor to the rivers’ health. He reached out from the field, and the call’s quality is about what you might expect for one coming from the middle of nowhere.
“Freshwater mussels, in general, provide a lot of ecosystem services,” Moles said. “Because the animals, part of their function is they sit there and they siphon water through. That's how to get their food supply. They're sucking water in and pushing water through. And so they provide this cleaning the water, removing suspended solids or organic matters and things of that sort. So they're actually an indicator of water quality health. So typically, the more mussel species you have and the more mussels in general, the greater the abundance. Typically, that's an indicator of higher water quality.”
They’re almost like a canary in a coal mine. No mussels equals bad water quality. But what might lead to the disappearance of these critters?
“So changes in the landscape,” he said. “So when we begin to deforest areas or we build strip malls or changed the way the landscape looks and that also changes the way the landscape behaves and acts as far as ecosystem services.”
A common example of human activity that negatively affects stream health is the removal of trees from a riverbed. Almost every drop of rain that falls to earth winds up in a river, either above ground or below ground. When the rain gathers in a water source, it brings sediment along with it.
“And that, in turn, will affect what's going on in our streams, either through increased runoff or non-source pollution,” Moles said. “Sometimes it's trash. And so that is one aspect, but also we see that with, there's some habitat alterations that occur in our rivers with– sometimes people put down too many trees near a stream bank. And think of the soil right? The soil is just a loose aggregate of dirt, as people like to call it. The only thing that's holding it in place are the roots of the trees on the stream banks. If those trees are gone, there's nothing there to hold the bank in place, and so that's why we see a lot of stream bank erosion. In effect, not only mussels but crayfish, some of our small non-game fish. And it can even affect sport fish like smallmouth bass if there's enough sedimentation within a stream where a lot of the good cover rock is smothered up.”
The more than $2 million Fish and Wildlife grant will fund an effort to prevent this kind of habitat alteration on the shores of the Little Red River. The grant supports the conservation of the Northern Long-Eared Bat, a small fish called a yellowcheek darter, and, of course, the speckled pocketbook.
Arkansas's funding is explicitly a land-acquisition grant.
“Specifically, the land that's going to be purchased will be in the upper Little Red River watershed,” said Arkansas Game and Fish Commission spokesperson Trey Reid. “That's the Little Red River– branches of it above Greers Ferry Lake, upstream from Greers Ferry Lake. So it'll be about 1,100 acres that will be protected in the upper Little Red River watershed in Van Buren County.”
In addition to the federal funding, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is also providing $80,000 to the project. Plus, another conservation partner organization is supplying $827,500 to purchase and protect land adjacent to the state’s property.
Reid said that even though the species targeted by this grant are not game species or even creatures that might be on an Arkansas sportsperson’s radar, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission still holds their survival as a priority.
“In a general sense, protecting all species is important,” Reid said. “And a lot of people think of Arkansas Game and Fish as you know being about the game species. You know the white-tailed deer, eastern wild turkeys, and largemouth bass, catfish, bluegills and you name it. But you know our responsibility under Amendment 35 in the Arkansas constitution is to all species and to the citizens of Arkansas. So, anything we can do to protect species and keep these species around that are at risk of extinction or population declines. In some cases, we manage the ecosystem as a whole. So anything we can do to protect these species is going to protect our ecosystems across Arkansas into the future so future generations can enjoy some of the same things that we enjoy today.”
The agency will work to implement best practices for land management across the habitat. Reid said they’ll specifically target the management of gravel roads in the area and facilitating prescribed fires, allowing the ecosystem to readopt its pre-settlement form.
Reid also mentioned the land will be protected for public use. Numerous recreational pursuits rely on access to clean waterways. Fishing, swimming and kayaking might be some of the first activities that come to mind, and all would probably be less than enjoyable if they took place in a dirty, lifeless stream.
At least, that’s what Jeff Quinn thinks. He’s the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s river and stream fisheries program supervisor and is an expert on the yellowcheek darter, the endangered fish targeted by federal funding. He said these small, ray-finned fish only occur in Arkansas and need a specific type of environment to survive.
“It's basically what we call a riffle obligate species,” Quinn said. “These are areas that are shallow with strong currents, and they live in the gravel and boulder crevices, and they need swift water to live and survive. And so they're kind of susceptible to the impacts of drought or really dry periods when some of those areas can dry up, and the most their habitat in this, and they're only found in the Little Red River Basin in Arkansas, nowhere else in the world. And the impoundment of the Greers Ferry Dam eliminated most of their habitat in the world, and they're now just confined to the upper forks of the Little Red system.”
The dam restricted their habitat, but the Fayetteville Shale Play, a 2013 fracking operation, posed the biggest threat to stream species’ habitats.
“With the pipeline right of ways, all the different well pads that were being constructed, and all the erosion that would be caused in those areas,” he said. “And the land clearing associated with it, and there was a lot of ponds going in, it was a water-intensive process, and all that water used, they drained that out of the river. One project might not be that big of a deal in one spot, but if you got hundreds of them spread out all of a sudden, cumulatively, can add up to a big impact on the river.
Game and Fish will rehabilitate its acquired land from the stress of these activities and possibly enhance public access to recreation in the waters of the Little Red. However, Quinn, an angler himself, emphasizes the intrinsic value of protecting the stream's creatures for what they are, not just for how it impacts people.
“Our diversity is all so amazing,” Quinn said. “These critters have unbelievable beauty. If you handle a yellowcheek darter, they often have these brilliant red fins. Although they're kind of brown fish, they have these interesting patterns of yellow spots on the side. Sometimes, especially the breeding males, can have interesting blue colors under their chin. These darters are like our songbirds of the aquatic world, and so they're really amazing. They have unbelievable beauty. It's part of our natural heritage that we want to preserve for our children. We never want extinction to occur because it's permanent, and it makes sense to keep the parts of our ecosystem.”
