I had a unique opportunity yesterday to observe mussels in the Maumee River
here in Toledo, Ohio, and made some great observations of natural history.
The fall seiches (pronounced "saysh" like "seine" for those of you who fish)
have been going on this last week, where persistent Southwest to West winds
push all the water from the west end of Lake Erie on over to PA and NY. It
can be pretty graphic... Following is a link to a page put together by some
Sea Grant folks:
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/glwlphotos/Seiche/1113Storm/November2003.html
That's out on the lake... (which I will note we have seen live cylindrical
papershell and pink heelsplitter in the open lake)
In 2001, I observed the extreme seich event described here, but from an up
river perspective:
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/glwlphotos/Seiche/Seiche1.html
This particular event was incredible, as the winds suddenly stopped, and the
6.5 feet of water came rushing back in. There are 55 gallon drum buoys
marking the shipping channel of the Maumee River in downtown. The
_upstream_ current was harsh enough to SUBMERGE the buoys for approx 10
minutes, with a pulse period of about 45 minutes where they were bouncing up
and under the water's surface. The current disoriented large schools of
emerald shiners and small gizzard shad.... The gulls had an amazing feast.
Todd
Mud Madness!
----- Original Message -----
From: "matt ashton" <ashtonmj2003-in-yahoo.com>
To: <nanfa-l-in-nanfa.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 9:16 AM
Subject: Re: NANFA-L-- More Madtom Stings...
> Being a central basin guy myself I never knew about that happening on the
lake. I may have heard about it one or two times, or as a phenomenon in
general, but never knew that happened in the western basin. Pretty cool
stuff! Also really cool to see that mussels still somewhat exist in the ole
lake too, especially the small specimens.
>
> Matt
> Cookeville, TN
>
> "Todd D. Crail" <tcrail-in-UTNet.UToledo.Edu> wrote:
> Hi gang,
>
> I've been busy playing in the fall seiches, periods of standing wind from
> the west/southwest that push the water of Lake Erie on over to Ontario, PA
> and NY, and leave us pretty much high and dry here in the extreme western
> basin. There will be some more about that, and a talk about how dreamy the
> Portage River is, once everything is done and I have all the photos
> compiled. I posted a link to some of them on the Unio email list the other
> day since I had all my mussel stuff. If you want to look-in-them now
(there
> will be other additional galleries that are specific to our interests
> shortly) the url is:
>
> http://www.farmertodd.com/Mussels/SeicheNov05/
>
> Yes, I had the Muddy Madness! :)
>
> While all this is going on, it's a prime time to catch tadpole madtom
> because they're very concentrated and pushed out of the logs, sunk trash
and
> such that their cryptic life keeps them hidden from our nets. I stupidly
> envenomated myself again by trying to pick a small juvenile up instead of
> floating him into my hand...
>
> This time the tadpole sting didn't make me sick (this is my second tadpole
> sting). But man they have the most potent sting I've ever experienced. It
> was bad enough that when we were catching stonecat later, the first
question
> out of my friend Ryan's mouth was wether they stung or not too... Then he
> started talking about how pretty they were lol.
>
> Anyway, I screwed up twice that day. I decided a three pack of the tiny
> specimens would make a nice "under rock" clean up crew. I usually try to
> feed prior to introduction so that the new fish going in aren't "food" to
> established specimens. I was in a semi-hurry during acclimation and for
> some reason didn't feed yet (food was sitting there thawed and ready to
go).
>
> When I put the fish in, a longear came out and SMOKED one of the tadpole
> madtoms. The madtom ended up dying (I assume from stress) but man did that
> longear get a hurt put on him. He was bleeding out his gills and had his
> gill flaps extended even into the next morning. Of course, I'm
> anthropomorphizing what I imagine the sting felt like in its mouth... But
> still. Ouch. He survived just fine though. He was back to his normal
> sassy self later the following evening.
>
> Kindofa "gee whiz" post, but I thought it might be of interest since we
> probably don't usually set up situations where our aquarium fish are going
> to be able to put a whole madtom in their mouth... The Reefle (tm) has its
> ways of showing some of the different things that are more likely to
happen
> in the stream.
>
> Todd
> The Muddy Maumee Madness, Toledo, OH
> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
> http://www.farmertodd.com
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