Be careful what you pick up on the banks of the Paint Rock River. There’s a frighteningly real risk it may be the last of its kind.
Carla Atkinson, the aquatic biologist and ecologist from University of Alabama, reminded us of this when she toured the Paint Rock River recently. One of the river’s brief rages had subsided, and we combed the beach looking for what had been left behind. Carla is a mussel specialist — a good thing to be in a state that has more mussel diversity than the entire South American continent — but even she was a little taken aback when she laid the spent shells out and counted the number of mussel species in this small stretch of stream.
It’s not a large river by Alabama standards. The main stem is 60 miles long, one of the state’s smallest. The drainage basin, with all its tributary streams stretching up above the Walls of Jericho into Tennessee, is only a little bigger.
But for some reason, it remains packed with life. The riverine unit it’s part of is rivaled only by the Cahaba and upper Alabama as a center of aquatic diversity for all of North America. A half mile of stream in either of those places would have more fish species than the entire state of California. Paint Rock’s diversity may have once been rivaled by the much larger Tennessee tributaries downstream — the Elk, the Flint, the Duck. But careless development and water management have long since compromised the diversity of those rivers. And thus the Paint Rock stands alone, as the last refuge of one of the world’s most biologically diverse environments.
I was startled the other day to realize how large an area that last refuge serves. I spent many years along the Swannanoa River in North Carolina, outside Asheville, which is connected to the Tennessee by way of the French Broad. A hundred and fifty years ago, the Swannanoa must have looked something like the Paint Rock. But the valley floor of that river is now so packed with warehouses and retirement homes and highways and strip malls and parking lots and folks looking to grab a scenic view of nature, there’s no room left for a river to run. And the Swannanoa, like so many American rivers, is rapidly becoming little more than a ditch.
So as I was parsing the life stories of the many rare species in the Paint Rock, just below the preserve, I was surprised to find how many were first identified hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the Appalachians. The very elegant and critically imperiled blotched logperch, for example, was first identified in the Swannanoa River, very near a spot I once used to fish (with little success). And while the blotched legperch may have once been widespread in the Tennessee system, it is now completely gone from the French Broad and most of its tributaries, including the Swannanoa. Only a couple of dozen populations remain anywhere. The healthy populations in Paint Rock will be critical to the survival of the species.
The same can be said of the once widespread palezone shiner. There are only two (2!) populations of this fish left globally, with the largest population in Paint Rock. And the Alabama lampmussel, which was lost from 95% of its original range, with only two (2!) remnant natural populations. And the pale lillput mussel, once known from many populations in three states, now reduced to one (1!) remnant natural population. Or the many other fish and mussels that are now rare or lost virtually everywhere but in the Paint Rock system. Many states are now looking to Paint Rock to restore their lost populations, and perhaps one day, there’ll be enough of the Swannanoa left to restore with blotched logperch from Paint Rock.
Forests have rivers, and rivers make the forests surrounding them. That’s why it’s inevitable that the Paint Rock Forest Research Center will have to support research on the great river in the center of it all. Carla has been developing research projects in the Paint Rock River for some time, and brought with her Felipe Rossetti de Paula, a post doc researcher from Brazil who has been focused on how surrounding forests affect the course and health of rivers. We spent the better part of the day with Alabama A&M faculty and staff on this brainstorming tour, to see how Paint Rock could have the research it deserves. Given the diversity we see, it ought to be one of the two or three most thoroughly researched rivers in North America.
