Va. trout streams in trouble

By Carlos Santos
Media General News Service
Published: July 9, 2008

Up in these mountains in Madison County where streams still flow cold and passably clean, the wild brook trout is fighting for its life, mostly against acid rain.

Here and there in nameless streams or famous ones such as the St. Mary’s River, the brook trout has disappeared or faced eradication - an ominous sign given that it’s a tough fish that can swallow a lot of pollution.

Of the 500 or so trout streams in Virginia, about one-third have been affected seriously enough that aquatic life has been harmed, according to researchers. In about 50 of those streams, water quality is so poor that they have little or no trout or much aquatic life.

The startling news is that pollution that causes acid rain has abated significantly. The bad news is that the damage done in Virginia is long-term.

“It can be fixed but not in our lifetime,” said Rick Webb, a senior scientist at the University of Virginia who has been studying Virginia’s trout streams for years.

The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments have reduced acid deposits on land and water by half as of now, Webb said, and further tightening of the standards will cut the deposits in half again by 2020.

“It’s been a remarkable success,” said Webb, project coordinator for the Virginia Trout Stream Sensitivity study that began in 1987 and the Shenandoah Watershed study that began in 1979.

“Even with a demand for increase in electricity, sulfur emissions have gone down.”

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Acid rain - atmospheric acid deposition - has been a problem in Virginia since the 1970s, all from wind patterns that bring pollutants from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest.

Because of their higher elevation, the forested mountains catch most of the acid rain. Many of the state’s trout streams have a limited capacity to neutralize the acid formed by nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide.

While sulfur-dioxide emissions have decreased, Virginia is not seeing the recovery that has occurred in the Northeast, said U.Va. professor Jim Galloway, co-director of the two landmark studies.

“Our soils retain atmospheric sulfur for a longer time. There is no quick fix,” he said.

The only quick fix is temporary. The St. Mary’s River in Augusta County is healthy today but only because about 40 tons of lime are dumped into the river’s headwaters about every five years, Webb said.

“It will take decades - a century - for the water chemistry to become improved,” said Gordon Olson, chief of natural and cultural resources at the Shenandoah National Park, through which about 100 cold-water streams tumble.

Why care about these usually tiny streams, often located in remote areas, and brook trout, which many Virginians never have seen?

Scientists say that as streams, rivers, fish and aquatic life go, so goes the quality of life.

“The ecosystem is a fabric, and it’s all unraveling,” Webb said. “If we lose wild places and what makes wild places wild, I think we’ll suffer psychologically.

“We have to be careful. We’ve done the damage. That doesn’t mean we can’t do more.”

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Webb wants to educate the public about acid rain.

Recently at Graves Mountain Lodge near Syria, high school students from Virginia and nearby states attended a fishing camp held annually by Trout Unlimited to educate them about the importance of cold-water fisheries and the evils of acid rain.

On the banks of the Rose River, the students learned not only about brook trout that inhabit the stream but about mayflies that dance above it and nymphs that burrow into its bed.

The students learned about water chemistry and how pollutants that form acid rain drift into the pristine streams.

“We hook them with fishing, but the main thing is conservation,” said Paul Kearney, director of the camp run by the nonprofit conservation group whose mission is to preserve cold-water streams.

Over the years, hundreds of Trout Unlimited volunteers and others have taken water samples to be tested in U.Va.’s environmental labs in Charlottesville. Each quarter, 65 trout streams in the state are sampled.

In Shenandoah National Park, the focus of the Shenandoah Water study, streams are sampled weekly.

To fight acid rain, Galloway said, pollutants must continue to be reduced and trout streams must continue to be monitored to document changes.

The huge amount of data being collected from the streams is critical for informing policymakers, Webb said.

“Keeping track of fundamental eco-conditions is something that an enlightened society should be doing routinely and without question,” he said.

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Meanwhile, cold-water streams face other threats: nitrogen-oxide emissions, which come mostly from cars and trucks; runoff from poultry farming, which can pollute water; timber-harvesting practices, which can lead to silt runoff; and such pests as the woolly adelgid, which kill hemlocks that provide a cool canopy for the streams.

The James River Association gives the James and the state’s trout streams a C grade. That indicates the state’s environment is, at best, plain average.

“These stream systems are good indicators of what’s going on in the ecosystem at large,” Webb said.