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"Jay DeLong" <jdelong at nwifc_wa.gov>: NANFA-- Oregon collecting
--------- Begin forwarded message ----------
From: "Jay DeLong" <jdelong at nwifc_wa.gov>
To: nanfa at aquaria_net
Cc: "Bock, Robert" <BockR at hd03_nichd.nih.gov>,"Hal Schmidt"
<Harold.J.Schmidt-1 at tc_umn.edu>, jbondhus at lkdlink_net
Subject: NANFA-- Oregon collecting
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 09:03:14 +0000
Message-ID: <9706151605.AA15431 at nwifc_wa.gov>
On Saturday May 31 NANFA members from Oregon (Norm Edelen, Lisa
Hayashi, Dan Logan, Joe Middleton, Rachel Lusby) and Washington (Jay
DeLong) and the Greater Portland Aquarium Society (Wayne Yamashita)
met in Oregon.
We arrived at Dan Logan's house in Albany, OR, at 10 AM, and Dan
treated us to a tour of his home, which is on the historical registry
in Oregon. The house was built in 1900. Time hasn't been kind to the
interior of it, so Dan and his wife Christine are in the process of
restoring it to its once great beauty. They have done an amazing job
and we all can't wait to see it again when they're finished.
So, after helping ourselves to seconds (OK, thirds) of Christine's
breakfast breads, we headed to a wildlife refuge near Corvallis, to
seine a series of eight Oregon State University research ponds. Grass
carp had been released into the 75-ft by 200-ft ponds 30 years ago,
and people have recently seen the outlines of large fish moving
through the ponds. We were there to see if there were still grass
carp in the ponds as well as see whatever else the ponds held. The
mystery of the large fish had actually been solved only a week prior
by a OSU class who were brought there to learn proper fish collection
techniques and caught a single grass carp.
Sampling was a real challenge in the deep ponds. Our 75-ft by 10-ft
deep seine allowed us to sample only the shallow end of each pond,
where be found bluegill, largemouth bass, black bullhead and
mosquitofish. Dan and I then tried to sample an entire pond and
dog-paddled and drug the seine across the entire pond, finding the
same species, but no grass carp.
We found many rough-skinned newts in the seine. This newt secretes a
toxic chemical and recently a OSU student swallowed one as a prank (I
assume) and died. Ah, those fraternity parties. We disturbed two
large common garter snakes in the grass and Norm caught one which was
nearly 3-ft long.
We then headed to the Willamette River and sampled two sites: first at
Booneville slough just outside of Corvallis and then 25 river miles
upstream at Irish Bend. At both sites we sampled shallow pools and
shallow to mid-depth riffles of slow to medium velocities. We were
lucky and found a wide range of natives and a few introduced species.
Of special significance to me were two species which I hadn't seen
before: the leopard dace and mountain sucker. I especially wanted to
see the leopard dace, which isn't found in Washington (except for the
Columbia River system). Dan took us to Irish Bend in search of this
fairly uncommon fish and we also collected the day's single peamouth,
threespine stickleback and chinook salmon there.
We collected the following native species (in no particular order)
from the Willamette River: prickly sculpin, redside shiner, Northern
squawfish, reticulate sculpin, chiselmouth, largescale sucker, torrent
sculpin, speckled dace, mountain sucker, peamouth, leopard dace,
threespine stickleback and chinook salmon. The introduced fish we
collected were: bluegill, yellow bullhead and yellow perch.
We had collected 19 species for the day, and we all agreed the trip
had been a complete success. To top off the day, we returned to Dan's
home where we were joined by NANFA members Amy Tarlow and Layn
Luedtke for a venison barbecue and more of Christine's delicious
cooking.
Jay DeLong
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