Environmental Echo

Photo by Ursula Ruhl

By Jess Holmes

It’s thanks to the Saint Louis Zoo’s Michael Dawson that spring peepers, chorus frogs, and cricket frogs are still on the map ­— literally. Dawson’s creation and maintenance of the FrogWatch chapter known as the Spring Peeper Program in St. Louis has put these small, but noisy creatures back on conservation radar.

Statewide, these critters are not near extinction, but Dawson explores the effects urbanization has had on their significant population loss in the St. Louis area, while also encouraging the community to get involved in reversing their decline.

“I started looking at data collected by citizen scientists, species by species. One of the patterns I recognized is that certain species were almost completely absent inside of I-270. Whereas you go three minutes outside of I-270, they show back up on the observation maps,” Dawson said. “Some frog species are unaffected by urbanization, but the spring peepers, chorus frogs, and cricket frogs all seemed to be.

“I wanted to see if the citizen-collected data was true, and the Zoo encouraged me to put a project together. So, I did. After getting it approved and funded, I started setting up acoustic surveying devices around the St. Louis area,” Dawson explained. “Over the last three years, I found that the citizen scientists were right.”

The Saint Louis Zoo FrogWatch program stems from an even larger effort, FrogWatch USA. The Akron Zoo manages the national program. The mission is to build a community to help the frog and toad populations across the United States. Thanks to smartphones, this has become even easier.

“If you’re out in the field and have a phone, you can record a frog’s call,” Dawson said. “Recording calls is even better than using photos because I can download it, put it through my software, and can determine what species it’s from. Plus, it’s timestamped and GPS coded. It’s no different than the recording devices I leave out on trees.”

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Photo by MDC Staff, courtesy Missouri Department of Conservation.

By: Zoe DeYoung

A billion dollar project to prevent invasive Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes is set to begin construction this year, but don’t feel too bad for the nuisance fish.

The species has been wreaking havoc throughout the Mississippi River Basin, out-competing native fish for living space and resources since the 1980s.

Pictured: Jill Moon

Longtime Alton Telegraph reporter Jill Moon first heard of the invasive carp issue at a 2009 city council meeting in Grafton, a river town where the Illinois River acts as a perfect feeder for breeding carp.

Three entrepreneurs presented a plan at the meeting to capitalize on the carp. “They thought they had a good money making venture,” Moon said.

The plan involved an Asian carp processing plant. It got the green light. Moon was on the story from there: if you have lemons, make lemonade; if you have carp, put them on the menu.

“When I went to these city council meetings, they would have the boring stuff like, ‘The Street Department fixed Oak Avenue.’ A factory to make Asian carp byproducts stood out to me. And I already knew that the Asian carp was a problem,” Moon said.

A problem not only for native aquatic life, but for boaters. Asian carp tend to feed at the water’s surface and are very easily disturbed. When agitated by a boat propeller or even a sculler’s oar, they can jump up to 10 feet in the air. Think popcorn, but instead it is hundreds of soaring fish.

“Certain times of year when they are spawning, the Asian carp will jump out of the Illinois River. They’ve jumped in boats before, and they’ve accidentally given bloody noses,” Moon explained. “They’re a nuisance species,” Moon added. “So that just struck a nerve in me to find out more.”

The Grafton-based American Heartland Fish Products plant was the brainchild of those entrepreneurs at the meeting Their plan came to fruition, soon processing as much as 60,000 pounds of carp a day, as well as fish oil, fish meal and a funky smell.

The odor began to bother residents, so much so that the plant was given 30 days to address the stink. Ultimately, the plant went kaput.

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