Last Saturday, June 6th, I volunteered to help de-brush a walk-off trail leading to a Laurel Knob cliff owned by the Carolina Climbing Coalition (CCC) located just outside the Panthertown Backcountry Area. Although I am not a rock climber, I joined the CCC because of the amazing amount of excellent natural-lands conservation work that they do. FWIW, I do like to climb around within caves, and climbers and cavers are right beside each other on the continuum, so I am comfortable hanging with climbers.
The de-brushing event was hosted jointly by the CCC and Friends
of Panthertown, and the day’s leader for Friends – Kara – mentioned that her
group was soon going to conduct an aquatic macroinvertebrate survey within Panthertown
Valley. I did four years of freshwater macroinvertebrate consulting work early
in my environmental consulting career, so aquatic invertebrates have been an
interest of mine for lo these many later years. I turn over rocks within
streams as I come to them on day hikes, but just tell companions I’m looking
for salamanders because that’s what they can relate to.
After intros were done all around, I sidled up to Kara, mentioned my macroinvert experience, and asked if they needed another pair of hands for their Panthertown surveys. She added me to her list, and a few days later invited me on the Saturday survey trip. Participants included her, Kaci, Cathy, Tom, Kelsey, Savannah, Richard, and me. There were two sampling locations, one in Panthertown Creek and the other at its confluence with Greenland Creek where together they form the Tuckasegee River. The Friends’ Forest Service permit covered only invertebrates, so we focused on those, although a few unidentified larval salamanders were also inadvertently captured in the nets.
The group pushed dipnets through the two creek’s sandy, gravelly bottoms and picked up leaf packs from downstream of logs beside stream edges. This material was then dumped onto a fine-mesh seine laying on a sandbar, allowing water to drain away so we could more easily pick through the substrates. The photo below has Kelsey, Savannah, and Kaci picking away. The pile of debris in the bottom near-center is what I had gone through before taking the pic.
This effort produced a lot of stick-caddis caddisflies; lesser numbers of salamanders, mayflies, and dragonflies; and a very few stoneflies and craneflies. All of the insects were larval instars. As each animal was spotted, it was spooned up and into a water-filled ice tray pocket during the “picking” operation for identification and later enumeration. All organisms were released alive after being documented. We typically put only one taxon in each pocket, as you can see in the picture below. The four pockets on the far left contain stick caddises, fourth from top left has a sand-grain caddis, fourth from bottom left harbors a dragonfly nymph, and juvenile salamanders are in the third from top right and first and second from bottom right. I have never before seen ice trays used in this way, and I think it is a brilliant idea, as the dark organisms stand out very well against the plastic’s bright white, making catches more easily identifiable.
This photo shows the coarse-grain-benthic survey site at the first Panthertown Creek site. Its many, mostly sand-imbedded logs and limbs create abundant microhabitats for aquatic critters. A small dead fish was found here in a quiet backwater and identified by Kara as possibly a darter (Etheostoma?), which I forgot to photograph.
We spotted another dead fish in a quiet water microhabitat at the second site that Tom identified later as a Western Blacknose Dace (Rhinichthys obtusus).
Here is a link to its iNaturalist photo page: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/84498-Rhinichthys-obtusus/browse_photos. The species is quite variable in coloration. We don’t know why it was dead in the water, but it was freshly killed, possibly a victim of microfishing. Some of the other animals we saw were a black-throated green warbler (Setophaga virens) that caught a caterpillar on the trail in front of us while we were lunching, a common sand dragonfly (Progomphus obscurus), ebony jewelwing damselflies (Calopteryx maculata), and an Appalachian jewelwing (Calopteryx angustipennis). Thanks go to Tom Martin, a Board Director of Friends of Panthertown, for these identifications.
In my consulting days, collecting macroinvertebrate samples meant lugging around heavy dredge samplers, heavy one-liter mud samples, and heavy jerry cans of preservatives. We carried them into company vans in the morning, drove to motels far away and schlepped them all into the rooms that evening, lugged some of them back into the vans the next morning, transferred them again that morning from vans to boats, lugged them from boats to vans that evening, and toted them from vans into motel rooms at the end of the day. We did that day after day during a given field trip, then put them all back into the vans at the end of the trip and drove them back to the company office. A motel manager once said to me, “Y’all are the toten’-ist bunch of people I ever saw!”
Saturday’s trip with Friends, however, was fun. Everything we toted was lightweight, there were no benthic samples to lug 300 feet uphill, we weren’t exposed to unhealthy preservatives, examining leaf packs for mayflies is to me like an Easter egg hunt, and everybody was good company.
Furthermore, getting out into the woods in places like Panthertown in early summer reminds me that we are on an incredibly beautiful and rich planet in a universe loaded with cold, airless worlds and unrelenting radiation. Trips like Saturday’s are additionally easy on the mind because these aquatic macroinvertebrate surveys have long-lasting management value. The data we collect may seem to be only black-and-white squiggles on tables and graphs strung out over the decades, but it adds to a sense that maybe my life has counted for something. I thank my Friends.
