MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Biologists in western North Carolina are out looking for a precious fish. The Southern Appalachian brook trout are ancient. They've been here since the ice age. They are also a bellwether for clean water. As an environmentally sensitive fish with specific habitat needs, they can tell us whether streams are healthy. So biologists are eager to see how many survived last fall's Hurricane Helene. Katie Myers of Blue Ridge Public Radio and a nonprofit media organization, Grist, has this report.
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KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: Jacob Rash and his brook trout crew are out and about in the Pisgah National Forest near Asheville searching for brook trout.
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MYERS: They've been at it for a couple of months.
JACOB RASH: Each creek is different. Each river is different. And so each impact is potentially different.
MYERS: Rash is a biologist for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. The fish can tell him a lot about whether Helene damaged water quality.
RASH: You can almost think of them as just these really beautiful stream canaries, right?
MYERS: Helene hit the brook trout at a vulnerable point in their life cycle when they're laying eggs. The storm was so big and wide, it's just been hard to drill down into exactly how bad the damage was.
RASH: If adults made it through the storm and then spawned, well, what's that population look like? Or if it's adults spawned before the storm, then maybe we're missing that group of fish that were born last year.
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MYERS: We get our waders on and step out into the stream. Maggie Coffey is a wildlife technician in the brook trout crew. She worries about too many lost trees hurting the trout.
MAGGIE COFFEY: They generally like colder waters. So anytime you have canopy loss, which we saw - we're seeing a lot with Helene, that'll warm up the creeks and streams.
MYERS: Coffey and her crewmates start fishing, not with poles, but with metal rods connected to a backpack.
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MYERS: It sends electric currents through the water. It's not dangerous for the fish. The electricity just stuns them for a while so the crew can put the fish in a bucket, count and weigh them.
COFFEY: So right now, we're just shocking along the - within the creek, and we're putting more emphasis on the deeper holes 'cause that's where we think we'll find the trout.
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MYERS: The team catches a few rainbow trout, which are not native to these mountains and sometimes outcompete the smaller and less aggressive brook trout. And it's not just rainbow trout that threaten them. Brook trout occupy just about 30% of their former habitat range due to logging, development and warming streams, researchers say. But then, good news.
COFFEY: I think we got one. We got one?
MYERS: The team holds up the brook trout. It's a pretty fish - dark green patterns on its body and red fins.
COFFEY: One forty-two, 26.8.
MYERS: They measure and weigh the fish. It'll take this brook trout crew about a year to analyze all the data. Rash is amazed at even seeing one brook trout in an hour's trip. He calls it a good sign that the population here could be pretty healthy.
RASH: It's just cool to see them persist and knowing they've been here for so long, and they still find a way to make it.
MYERS: As the brook trout wakes up, the team lets it go free, and it quickly darts away.
For NPR News, I'm Katie Myers in Candler, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIOHEAD SONG, "WEIRD FISHES/ARPEGGI") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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