NPS photo.
Biologists add green dye to Antimycin to track its progress in the stream.
On a cool, foggy morning, the fisheries crew began their day’s work, hiking uphill along the babbling Lynn Camp Prong near Tremont to take their place at stream-treatment stations. The crew this day consisted of fisheries biologists Steve Moore and Matt Kulp, seasonal fisheries employees, biologists from agencies throughout the southeast, and a representative of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The treatments were a new way for the Smokies to remove unwanted species—in this case, rainbow trout—from the water and restore the habitat for the once-abundant native brook trout.
At designated pools and turns in the river, people broke off from the group singly or in pairs and carried their gear to the streamside, where a stand with 5-gallon buckets filled with a piscicide—a fish pesticide to remove non-native fish—sat poised over the water. When everyone in the group had reached their stations, the biologists farthest upstream released a green flourescein dye into the water. Then they turned a valve on the buckets, and the piscicide—in this case an antibiotic called Antimycin A—began dribbling into the stream. As the dye traveled downstream past other stations, the biologists at each station turned on their valves to release more Antimycin, thus beginning a continuous eight hour treatment for that section of stream. Soon the top reaches of the water shimmered with the green dye marking the antibiotic. As the piscicide flowed downstream, leaves and the tumbling cold water broke down compounds within it, but release stations at set points released more to maintain the antibiotic’s concentration at eight parts per billion.
