Fishless in Montana? Not these prairie streams

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/144774_fishless21.html

Headline:

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Fishless in Montana? Not these prairie streams

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HELENA, Mont. -- The first known survey of Montana's officially "fishless"
prairie streams has discovered they are teeming with numbers and varieties that
surprised state fisheries experts.

The 18,000 miles of waterways in the nearly 4,200 streams carried the official
"fishless" label only because no one had ever checked, said Ken McDonald, head
of the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department's special fisheries division.

Last summer, however, a $125,000 federal grant let the department send four
three-person teams to survey fish and aquatic life at 305 random stretches of
240 of the streams. The creeks, most in eastern Montana, range from the Rocky
Mountain Front to North Dakota.

"They'd see a stretch that didn't look like much, and they'd find 1,000 fish,"
McDonald said.

Many also had a biological diversity unheard of in Montana's famous cold-water
trout fisheries.

"In western Montana, if you have 10 species of fish in a stream, that's really
diverse," McDonald said. Many prairie streams had more than 30 species.

Most of the fish were no more than 2 or 3 inches long when fully grown.

The teams found fish such as the fathead minnow, the longnose dace and sand
shiner. They also found rainbow trout.

Prairie streams are warmer, siltier and saltier than cold-water streams, and
some dry up completely on occasion, McDonald said. He describes them as "boom
and bust" rivers -- running high and cold in the spring, dwindling to puddles
in early fall. Also, nobody fishes in them, which is why state scientists and
most of the public have ignored them, McDonald said.

  
 
The study also suggests that even intermittent creeks play an important role in
the prairie ecosystem. ... (cont)