April 22, 2025 • 55 mins
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Stocky Galaxias, or 'Stocky', is one of Australia's most critically endangered species — a tiny fish hidden away in the pristine alpine waters of Kosciuszko National Park.
Can the survival of this elusive, critically endangered species illuminate the future of Australia’s rivers? In this conversation we discuss efforts to save Stocky from the devastating 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires and the subsequent rallying of agencies and community groups to protect, conserve, and re-home this special little fish to ensure its survival for future generations. Dr. Siwan Lovett and long-time freshwater fish conservationist and researcher Dr. Mark Lintemans invite you on a journey through the challenges and breakthroughs in conserving this remarkable species. From the thrill of discovering a previously unknown new population, to the innovative strategies that blend natural and artificial solutions for habitat protection, this episode is packed with insights into the delicate balance of river ecosystems, invasive fish, community collaboration and conservation strategies.
We take a deep dive into the ongoing efforts to safeguard species like the Galaxiids and Macquarie perch while respecting the interests of recreational fishing. You'll hear how barriers, riparian vegetation, and even shifts in attitudes among trout enthusiasts are contributing to a new paradigm in fisheries management. These changes are essential to maintaining the health of aquatic ecosystems and ensuring that both native and introduced species can coexist.
Finally, we discuss the urgent issue of genetic diversity, a key factor in the resilience of fish populations against climate change. Discover how genetic research is transforming conservation strategies, with new approaches like cross-breeding and relocation aimed at boosting the genetic health of species under threat. Our conversation extends to the broader picture of Australia’s freshwater fish crisis, highlighting the pressing need for comprehensive conservation efforts.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (01:12):
My job is to protect threatened fish, and it can be a
paid job, it can be an unpaidjob.
That's my passion, right, andI've had immense pleasure out of
interacting, dealing withmonitoring, handling, fondling
fish over the years, and so Iwant my grandkids to have that
same opportunity and I feel thatit's sort of my responsibility
(01:34):
to look after fish, and I thinkthe community would be really
interested in these things ifthey knew what was going on.
Freshwaters around the worldare in real trouble, and
Australian freshwater fish arein real trouble, and Australian
freshwater fish are in realtrouble.
I think we just need to up ourgame a bit, not just worry about
the furry ones or the gaudyfeathered ones.
(01:54):
We need to think about thethings that are underwater out
of sight, and so if you lookafter stocky Galaxias, you will
also be looking after the littlespiny crayfish that are in the
streams, or the weird littlestoneflies or other little
greeblies that don't reallyfloat in my boat, but there's
plenty of people out there thatare stonefly huggins.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Hello and welcome to Take Me to the River, sharing
stories and inspiring hope withextraordinary people who care
for our rivers.
I'm your host, dr Shu-AnneLovett.
Today I'm talking to Dr MarkLintemans.
Mark is a long-time friend ofthe show and of the Australian
River Restoration Centre.
In fact, mark was a guest onour very first interview episode
(02:45):
of this show.
It's a pleasure to have himback to reflect on what's
changed, what's next in fish,ecology, climate, threatened
species and more.
Just before the 2019-20 BlackSummer, bushfires swept through
some of Australia's most uniqueand vulnerable ecosystems in
Kosciuszko National Park.
Australia's most unique andvulnerable ecosystems in
(03:06):
Kosciuszko National Park.
Mark and a team of dedicatedconservationists journeyed to
the mountains on January the14th 2020 to try to relocate as
many endangered little speciesknown as the stocky galaxiad.
Let me do that again.
Mark and a team of dedicatedconservationists journeyed to
the mountains on January 14,2020, to try and relocate as
many stocky galaxies, a smallendangered species, in something
(03:30):
of a Hail Mary.
The crew managed to capture 142of these little beauties, which
would have been affected more bythe violent storms forecast for
the area than the bushfirethemselves.
Heavy rain would wash ash andburnt vegetation into the stream
, smothering waterways,destroying habitat and
potentially depleting it ofoxygen.
(03:51):
Fast forward nearly five yearsand that initial population has
been successfully bred incaptivity due to the efforts of
researchers at Charles SturtUniversity and folks at the
Gaydon Hatchery.
So successfully, in fact, thata small population was released
into the wild at a speciallydonHatchery.
So successfully, in fact, thata small population was released
into the wild at a speciallyprepared site in 2023.
We're going to chat with Markabout what it was like to save
(04:13):
some of those remaining fish andwhat comes next for this
critically endangered andbeloved small-bodied fish.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Thank goodness it's not live.
I can do some interpretivedance, if you like there you go,
leave that one so mark welcometo the show and for all of those
listening.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Mark is a very good friend of mine.
We co-own a property togetherand we have been working
together for a long time now.
He has a wicked sense of humor,but I just wanted to share a
bit of an insight into some ofthe names that people have
called Mark because he does, atthis time of year, look a bit
like Santa Claus.
But when I told my team I wascoming to interview him this
(04:56):
morning, he was described as theGandalf of fishes, and so he
has got a magnificent whitebeard and that tends to spark
lots of interest from everywherehe goes.
So, as a poster child for Santa, can you tell us a bit more
(05:16):
about what you've been doingover the last five years with
the stocky galaxid?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, great pleasure to be here again, joanne Good.
So we've been doing a lot ofwork on stocky galaxius in the
last five years.
The most exciting thing, Ithink, is that we found a new
population of the species in atotally different catchment.
It's only about 30 kilometersas the crow flies from the
original one, but it's 350kilometers as the fish swim, so
(05:44):
it's a long way.
So that's at the top of theGoodredigby catchment, and the
original and what was previouslythe only population is at the
top of the Upper Murrumbidgee,above Tantangara Dam, in a place
called Tantangara Creek.
So, yes, we found a newpopulation and we've been doing
lots of work on that, and sowe've done a population estimate
(06:06):
there for stockies, and so wenow have just over 9,000, we
think fish in this tiny littlestream.
It's even smaller thanTantangarra Creek.
It'd be 80 centimetres wide,maybe 20 centimetres deep and
about 2.8 kilometres long andabout 2.8 kilometres long.
The thing that it shares withthe original population is they
(06:29):
are both above huge waterfalls,and it's huge waterfalls that
keep trout out, because stockiesand trout can't coexist.
One of the other things thatwe've done over the last few
years is the original populationwas infested with feral horses.
And so when feral horses crossstreams, they degrade bank
(06:51):
vegetation, they break down thebanks, they put a whole lot of
sediment and stuff into thestream, and so, while they're
not the primary cause or majorthreat to stockies, when you've
only got one or two populationsleft, you try and do everything
in your power to remove thosethreats.
And so, with the greatassistance of New South Wales
(07:14):
National Parks and WildlifeService, they built two
exclosures around the populationat Tantangarra Creek, and so
they went up.
They were due to go up just asthe bushfires roared through,
and so there was a bit of a dueto go up just as the bushfires
roared through, and so there wasa bit of a delay and they ended
up getting finished in aboutApril that year after the
bushfires were out.
And so we've been back tomonitor the horse crossings
(07:36):
across the stream, and it'sreally gratifying to say that if
I didn't have a GPS with me, Icould not find the horse
crossings anymore, because thevegetation has just come back,
like you wouldn't believe.
That's incredible.
The stream banks and thein-stream habitat is still a bit
trash because it's still fullof sand and gravel and the banks
(07:56):
are degraded or whatever.
So that will take decades ormore to recover, but we now have
the vegetation recovering, andthe vegetation is so important
for little Galaxids because itcan provide 30% of the food of
Galaxids.
So the grasshoppers, the ants,the whatevers fall onto the
surface of the stream and theselittle fish will eat them.
(08:19):
So that's one of the thingswe've been doing.
We've also had a PhD studentwho's just submitted his thesis,
working up there since 2016.
And so he's had a look at ordescribed the breeding ecology
of the species, when they breedand how many eggs they have, and
all that sort of stuff.
He's described the home rangeof the species.
(08:40):
Most individuals move less thanfive metres in their lifetime,
so they're pretty stay-at-homelittle guys.
And even more excitingly is hehas pioneered a new system for
finding waterfalls, and so,because waterfalls are so
important for the persistence ofstocky Galaxies or the
(09:04):
existence of stocky Galaxies, wecan now use LIDAR remote
sensing to find out wherethere's a change in elevation,
and if there's a metre dropbetween pixels or whatever, then
we can say well, there's awaterfall there, so we can go
out and survey for it.
So we have a chance of findingmore populations of stocky
Galaxies, and we have a goodchance of finding more streams
(09:28):
that don't have trout in them,so then they can be
reintroduction sites.
So that's just some of thethings we've been doing.
There are other things, butwe'll move on to, oh, captive
breeding.
We can't forget the captivebreeding.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, but hang on a minute Just before we go to
captive breeding that justraised so many questions going
through my head, so the firstone I wanted to ask was the new
population.
How did you know to look there?
How did you find that there wasthis new population of stockies
?
Because last time we spoke itwas all looking pretty dire for
stock eagle accidents.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Well, it's still looking dire, and if I tell you
the true story story, it's goingto make me look like a bit of a
fool.
So, anyway, here we go.
So I was actually out therelooking for spiny crayfish
because I did a survey for thecommonwealth as part of a larger
project to look at the bushfireimpacts on these spiny crayfish
that live in highland streamsand, as a by-product, whenever I
(10:20):
caught any galaxids in my trapsor electrofishing, I just just
took a fin clip, threw it in ajar, threw it in the backpack,
didn't think about it, came backto Canberra, threw some samples
to my friendly geneticist andhe then rings me up and says oh,
I found something interestingin your galaxia's fin clips.
And I said, oh, yeah.
And he said what do you reckonit is?
And I said I've got no idea.
(10:40):
And he said you've got anotherpopulation of stocky Galaxias
and I just about fell off thechair.
I said you're kidding me.
And so there you go.
So it always pays just to takelittle bits of thin clips or
whatever, because, for thepeople that don't know, stocky
Galaxias was only described in2014.
And prior to that, it was apart of a thing called the
(11:03):
Mountain Galaxius Complex and afriend of mine, tama Raddick,
did the taxonomy on them as partof his PhD and he described 15
galactic species from one, andStocci Galaxius was part of it.
And sort of the funny thing isthat 40 years ago another
colleague, well before my timeactually he was a later
(11:25):
colleague he had rolled, I think, eight or nine species of
Galaxus into mountain Galaxus.
So there's this splitting andlumping that's been going on
over the last 50 years.
Anyway, with the advent ofmodern genetics you can find
different species and then yougo back and look at the
morphology, the appearance ofthe fish, and you go oh yeah,
(11:46):
they are different, this one'sgot this and this one's got that
, you know.
So anyway, there you go.
I didn't even know I'd found itand I had.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
That's fantastic.
How brilliant.
I mean.
That must have been well acause for rejoicing, given that
we're just trying to protectthis other one by putting fences
up to keep horses out.
Like to have one in the wild isawesome actually.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
It was amazing, and so what it does is it gives you
great hope that there are otherpopulations out there, and so
one of the things that is goingto happen in early 2025 is that,
as part of the Snowy 2.0approval conditions, there will
be a broad catchment survey,commence using the new technique
(12:32):
developed with LIDAR andwhatever, and so Hugh Allen, my
PhD student, will be out thereassisting with that, and it will
run over a couple of years andthey'll be looking at a large
number of sites A to see whetherthey can find new populations
of stocky Galaxies, and B to tryand find those troutless
streams which may then betranslocation sites to establish
(12:54):
new populations.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So let's talk a bit more about why trout and
stockies can't live in the samestream.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Well, as your listeners will be aware, trout
are a really popularrecreational fish, and they are
popular because they're apredator.
They chase lures, they eatthings, okay, and so basically
nearly all of the Galaxids areat about the entree or hors
(13:23):
d'oeuvre size for trout, and sothey just eat them.
And you know, like a good-sizedtrout, a 350-millimetre trout
can eat a fish that might be 180millimetres long, and most
Galaxias are less than 100.
So they just hoover them up,and so they literally cannot
(13:44):
coexist together except undersome really special
circumstances.
And so galaxids were the toppredator in the stream.
They were the only fish thatwere up there in these tiny
streams, right?
So if they saw a trout, they'djust swim up to it with their
fin out to shake fins and sayhow you going, mate.
And of course trout would havea different idea.
So they have to be separated,and the usual way of separating
(14:08):
them is a waterfall, and awaterfall of a certain height,
so it can't be less than a metre, because trout jump.
Australian native fish don'tjump very much, trout do.
That's how they migrate totheir upstream spawning
locations and things like that.
So if you find waterfalls, youfind natural barriers in the
landscape and that's where yougo looking for weird little
Galaxids.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
So if you had an unlimited budget, would you be
building waterfalls up in thesnowies to separate Galaxids and
trout, Because we know thattrout are now here, they're not
going anywhere?
But surely there areopportunities there to say, okay
, well, trout can be found here,but not here, because this is
where we want our native fish tobe able to live successfully
(14:52):
and thrive.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
So one of the things you can do is you can build
artificial barriers, and thereare lots of them out there.
There are little stream gaugingweirs that have been built in
the 70s that are now no longerused, and trout may have died
out upstream of the weir in adrought or been eliminated by a
bushfire, and so then you couldgo and you augment those weirs,
(15:14):
you make them a bit higher andthen you've got a place to
reintroduce stockies.
There are lots of naturalbarriers in streams, cascades or
little waterfalls, and again inthe millennium drought in the
Cotter River catchment in theACT, brown trout disappeared
from an awful lot of habitats,and so that was an opportunity
to go and augment barriers orwhatever.
(15:35):
Government tends to move prettyslowly and so unfortunately,
the drought broke before wecould do things like that.
So you wouldn't go out to buildwaterfalls, you wouldn't go out
necessarily to put barriers insort of virgin habitat, but you
find areas where there's abarrier that is probably pretty
effective but not totallyeffective, and you make it
(15:58):
totally effective.
So there's a habitat immediatelyadjacent to Tantangara Creek, a
little place called KyandraCreek, and so I've done some
trout surveys out there and weflogged ourselves along this
stream and we got about half adozen trout in about a kilometre
of a stream.
And so you think, we know,there's a sort of a barrier
downstream so it keeps most ofthe trout out but not all of the
(16:21):
trout.
So one of the options is toaugment that barrier and then
you have to remove the trout outbut not all of the trout.
So you know, one of the optionsis to augment that barrier and
then you have to remove thetrout from the stream and that
becomes controversial becauseyou know, anglers think that
there's a conspiracy theory toeradicate trout from Australia.
We couldn't do that if wewanted to and we don't want to.
But yes, you can go and buildbarriers.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yeah, and it sounds like there's enough
opportunities.
These are really small streams,quite far-flung places as well,
to be able to do that whilstnot really disturbing the
opportunities for wrecked fishesand trout.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
That's right, and so you know.
This stocky Galaxius occurs intiny streams, you know, a metre
wide, 10 to 20 centimetres deep.
Really, you don't have goodtrout fishing opportunities
there.
There's not that much foodthere.
The fish will be small.
If you lose that as a troutfishery or something, you could
(17:14):
not lose very much at all andyou compensate by stocking trout
somewhere else where the damagehas already been done or where
there's no damage to be done.
So the Snowy Mountains lakesyou can be in Jindabyne are
stocked well with trout.
There's great trout fishingthere.
There's plenty of other streamswith good trout fishing.
So it's about trying toalleviate the fears that there's
(17:37):
some surreptitious movement totry and kill trout fishing in
Australia, because that's notthe case.
You've just got to be able toset aside some little streams
for native fish that are highlyendangered and then you can
continue with your trout fishingin other areas.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, so when we look at other species, then how do
fish like the Macquarie perchcope with trout?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
So Macquarie perch and trout usually coexist
because Macquarie perch theyused to occur in the Murray
River and Edward Warkool andplaces like that and there's now
just too much silt, sedimentand water regulation in those
streams that Macquarie perchdon't persist there.
So mackers, as I call them,exist mainly in upland streams
(18:24):
with good riparian vegetation.
They're well shaded, they'rerocky, whatever, and that's also
good trout habitat.
And so while they do coexist,that doesn't mean there isn't an
interaction between the two.
You have very few populationsof Macquarie perch left in the
country.
Maybe there's a dozen or 15.
And so again it's like the horseexclusion.
You want to do all that you canto protect these populations,
(18:46):
to allow them to prosper as muchas they can.
You would not ever attempt toeradicate trout from those
streams because you can't.
But you may stop stocking thosestreams with extra trout
because the science quiteclearly shows that if there is a
self-sustaining troutpopulation in a stream and you
throw more trout in, it doesn'tadd to the fishery.
(19:09):
Okay, the stream is at itscapacity.
You end up with either moresmall trout that you can't
really fish for very well, oryou just don't end up with any
more trout at all.
The ones that you've stockeddie out or don't persist very
much.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
So more isn't necessarily better.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
No, no, not at all.
You want to promote a betterfishery and so fisheries
regulations do that.
So some streams are catch andrelease.
So you catch your trout, youtake your photo, you release it
again, so that trout is there togrow bigger and fatter over the
years and so you have thosetrophy streams and you can have
the bread and butter likestreams or impoundments or even
(19:51):
put and take fisheries.
So in some of the places in theAlps and around the world where
you don't have good spawninghabitat for trout but you might
have good rearing habitat like alake, you put the trout in,
they grow, the anglers catchthem out, it's all good, you
take them home, you show yourfamily you've had a good time
and they stock them again nextyear.
(20:11):
So it's about separating theareas that you want to conserve
and those that you want topromote for recreational
fisheries.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Why do you think people get so afraid of this
idea that somehow all the troutare going to become extinct?
Because I can never recall thatbeing a message that has ever
been shared.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
No, and it's people don't like change.
Ok, and so you know my granddadused to fish for trout here and
we've always, you know, puttrout in the waters here and it
was a mammoth effort to spreadtrout across the highland areas
of Australia.
You know they went in milk canson horseback and all that sort
of stuff.
And so there's that, thathistory, that sort of cultural
(20:54):
element that still persists.
Fisheries don't want to get ridof trout at all.
Fisheries sell a lot of troutlicenses.
They make you know, revenue outof that, which then goes back
into threatened fishconservation or improvements to
trout fisheries.
It's just how it is.
Nobody trusts the government.
It's like they're not lookingafter us, they're just trying to
make money or do something likethat.
(21:15):
And so really it's about tryingto educate people and find some
common ground, and I've dealtwith many people who are in the
trout fraternity and we can havea good chat and all the rest.
On some issues we just cannotsee eye to eye, and that's the
way it is.
It's not animosity.
I don't hide my bent, which isfor conserving freshwater fishes
(21:39):
, and that's fine, but it's justabout reaching that middle
ground where you can say, well,some of these tiny little
streams, they're rubbish troutfisheries anyway, how about we
turn them over to conservation?
And so that's what you try anddo and that message is getting
across.
You know the old guard ischanging.
The new guard is coming in.
I'm part of the old guard.
That's fine.
Trout clubs are now assistingwith planting riparian trees or
(22:03):
doing things like that, andthat's great.
So you look after streams,everyone benefits.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, for sure.
So one of the things you alsomentioned before I had to go
back and ask more questions fromyour introduction was genetics.
Tell me a bit more about thegenetics and the stockies.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Genetics has come ahead in leaps and bounds in the
last 20 years, 10 years, fiveyears.
We're making new geneticdiscoveries all the time.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Why is that Mark?
Is it a new piece of technologyor have we just got smarter?
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Well, people have got smarter, but the technology and
the cost of doing genetics hasdropped quite dramatically and
the pace that you can do it athas increased dramatically.
And so now you can take alittle fin clip maybe two
millimetres by three millimetresfrom a fish and you can tell.
(22:58):
If you've got enough fin clips,you can tell who the brothers
and sisters are, who the parentsare, whether they come from the
same family at a site or from afamily downstream, whether the
families mix.
All of that sort of stuff, aswell as the big science
questions about when did thespecies diverge from each other,
(23:18):
and things like that.
So genetics is really becomingpart of the bread and butter of
fisheries management.
It's shedding insight intothings that we never knew, we
had problems with.
For instance, we can haveanother discussion at another
time about Macquarie perch,because there's some really
exciting genetic stuff that'sjust come out of that.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh well, I think we'll keep talking.
So I'm too fascinated by that.
So just with the stockies, theGoodredigby population, do they
have the same genetics as theTantangra Creek population?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So at the broad scale they do.
They're definitely the samespecies.
So all of the samples clustertogether, so you can see they're
the same species and theycluster separately to the other
Galaxid species.
When you get down to the finerscale, you can look at genetic
diversity of populations, and sogenetic diversity is really
(24:10):
important because of futurethreats like climate change.
So if you have a diversegenetic makeup, it means you
have the capacity to adapt tonew challenges.
So you might have a gene thatallows you to thrive under
warmer water conditions orthings like that.
Or breed a little later in theyear or earlier in the year or
(24:31):
things like that.
You might have better diseaseresistance genes.
So everyone loses geneticdiversity, just by chance.
It's just the way it happens.
It's genetic drift, and so ifyou have isolated populations
that are not connected, thatgenetic drift means that you
tend to lose your geneticdiversity because there's no one
coming from downstream to putthe gene back into your
(24:53):
population.
So you slowly become a littlemore inbred, basically, and
that's not a recipe that we wantto follow under climate change
scenarios.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
So are we in terms of our work on genetics.
With the stock eagle accident,are we at the point where we're
actually breeding orcross-breeding those two
populations?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So we haven't got there yet.
We have only bred theTantangarra Creek population at
the moment.
We've just done some geneticwork on them and have shown that
they are genetically distinct.
I think the Sally's Flat Creekpopulation has slightly higher
genetic diversity, but nothingto really write home about.
In Tantangarra Creek the StokkeGalaxies population is
(25:36):
subdivided by a sort of a steepgradient area, so there's two
what I call flats.
You know level pieces of ground.
So there's one at the bottomand one at the top, and funnily
enough they're called bottomflat and top flat.
We're very imaginative in thefish world, and so what we know
is that bottom flat has slightlyhigher genetic diversity than
top flat, and that's because topflat is losing diversity just
(26:00):
by chance and the bottom flatcan't quite get up there to
replenish it.
So we will probably do somemixing there.
And then what we found withother species is that all of
these isolated populations ofwhatever it is Macquarie perch
they were all kept separate forthe last 50 years because people
(26:21):
were worried about diluting thespecial adaptations that these
animals had to their own habitat.
And so now we realise that bykeeping them separate we're just
losing genetic diversity.
They're getting closer andcloser to winking out, and so
now we want to breed supermaccas or super sooty grunters
(26:43):
in the Northern Territory,whatever it is, and so we're now
mixing our genetic stocks, andso that will improve our genetic
diversity.
We had some concerns whereclosely related species mired
into breeds, so Macquarie perchactually has three species in it
, one in the coastal rivers, onein the Murray-Darling Basin and
then one in Kangaroo River,which we think is now extinct.
(27:04):
So anyway, so genetics isreally a fantastic tool, and we
now have a totally differentmanagement paradigm where we mix
our stocks to improve thegenetics rather than keeping
them separate.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So it really is about that word that we hear so much
nowadays, particularly withclimate change resilience, isn't
it?
It's building resilience intothe species.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Absolutely yeah, Because you're never sure what
individual sites are going to do.
Some might be spring fed, somemight be more prone to wildfire,
some might be more prone toalien fish invasion.
So you're never sure what thethreat is going to be.
But the higher the geneticdiversity that you have, the
better chance you have ofsurviving those sort of things.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
So you know we've talked about threatened species
and I know that you love talkingabout fish.
Other people like talking aboutkoalas or platypus and you
always, always do an eye rolllol, because fish are just so
much cooler.
Why should anyone care aboutthe stocky galaxid?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Well, as I said earlier, stocky galaxias they're
the top predator in theirstream.
Right, they were the top dogs.
You need predators and prey instreams to have balanced
ecosystems.
If you have no predators, thenthe cats take over, whereas the
dingoes will keep them down alittle bit, and so they were a
(28:28):
very important part of thatecosystem.
Why should people care aboutthem?
Well, my job is to protectthreatened fish, and it can be a
paid job, it can be an unpaidjob.
That's my passion, right, andI've had immense pleasure out of
interacting, dealing withmonitoring, handling, fondling
fish over the years, and so Iwant my grandkids to have that
(28:50):
same opportunity, and I feelthat it's sort of my
responsibility to look afterfish, and I think the community
would be really interested inthese things if they knew what
was going on.
And so freshwaters around theworld are in real trouble, and
australian freshwater fish arein real trouble, and so, you
know, I think we just need to upour game a bit, not just worry
(29:13):
about the furry ones or thegaudy feathered ones.
We need to think about thethings that are underwater, out
of sight, you know.
And so if you look after stockygalax, you will also be looking
after the little spiny crayfishthat are in the streams or the
weird little stoneflies or otherlittle greeblies that don't
really float my boat, butthere's plenty of people out
(29:35):
there that are stonefly huggers.
I've seen people with stoneflyT-shirts.
You know, I think that's goinga little too far, but that's all
right.
We all have our littlepeccadillo.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
This is from the man who wears a t-shirt that says
Fish Fondler Pty Ltd.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Well, that's right.
You know, you've got to havesome fun in life as well.
So that's what I've describedmyself as for the last 40 years
I'm a fish fondler.
You know I handle a lot of fish.
Anyway, we digress.
So, yes, stockies were at thetop of the ecosystem.
They're lovely little fish.
It's nice to know that thereare still some relatively
pristine streams out there thatcan support aquatic fauna, and
(30:11):
by promoting their existence tothe general public and everyone
else, then hopefully we lookafter our streams a bit better.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons I love
working in rivers so much creeks, wetlands, billabongs, whatever
you'd like to look whereverthere's a waterway because you
protect one thing and itprotects a whole other ecosystem
around that one thing, and partof the magic is that it's
underwater and you don'tnecessarily see it.
So when I talk to scientistslike you and I get my eyes open
(30:41):
to this whole other world.
It really is quite exciting.
And I know up in the SnowyMountains we've got a number of
really special species like thestocky, like the crayfish you
mentioned.
There's also a dragonfly that'sendangered, that we're also
trying to raise awareness about.
So letting people know thatthese special species are up
there, what are we asking themto then do?
Because we don't necessarilywant them to go and find them,
(31:04):
because there's so few of them,so we kind of have to love them
from a distance.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, you just need to A know that they're there and
B know that they're in troubleand C know what the things are
that are making them in trouble.
You know, I meet people all thetime who don't know that trout
are not a native species.
I meet people all the time whodon't know that trout are not a
native species.
I meet people all the time thatdon't know that carp are not a
native species.
And so by educating peopleabout what the true situation is
(31:31):
, then once you know, thenyou're empowered and you tell
your kids and you might tellsomeone else you've been on
holidays and you went up thereand you saw these lovely little
sausages swimming in the stream.
What are they?
You know, and so people get anappreciation for those sort of
things.
I don't expect people to go outand try and do on-ground
management, but, for instance,there's a subset of the
community that are landholders,broad acre landholders, and so
(31:55):
when you know what the threatsare or know where the special
places are because not all ofthese fish exist in national
parks you know some of them areon private land.
So then you can think, oh well,I won't plow to the river edge
or, gee, I'll plant some treesto put some shade on the stream,
or gee that erosion cut in agully up there.
(32:15):
Maybe I need to do something totry and prevent that
sedimentation going into thestream.
And you can't do that all onyour own and there are
government programs andsubsidies to do that sort of
work.
There's land care, there's allsorts of things that you can get
involved in.
But just to know what's outthere, what the threats are, and
to tell other people, that'sone of the great things that
(32:36):
anyone can do.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Absolutely agree.
Yeah, that's a terrific answer.
Thank you for making that soclear for everybody listening.
So, yes, as Mark says, we'renot expecting you to go out on
ground and do stuff, but justknowing more broadly what's
happening.
That's really important so thatwe know how we can look after
these.
In this case, we're talkingendangered fish.
So I wanted to now just expandto national level, australian
(33:01):
level, because I know thatyou've mentioned a couple of
times that freshwater systems inAustralia and indeed the world
are in trouble, and I knowyou've recently done some work
with the Biodiversity Councillooking at fish across Australia
.
Can you tell us a bit about themain findings for that?
Speaker 2 (33:18):
So many people would be aware that there's an
international conservationlisting process run by the IUCN,
and it's called the Red List,and it uses exactly the same
criteria for assessing whether aspecies is threatened as the
Australian government does.
So we 53 scientists, over aperiod of about the last three
(33:41):
or four years, have done anassessment of all of Australia's
freshwater fish, and so that'sreally important to do them all
at once so that you can actuallycompare apples and apples,
whereas previously peoplenominate one species and then 10
years later, another one getsnominated and they both end up
with the same categorisation youthink.
Are they really the same now,or has the one that was done 10
(34:04):
years ago?
Is that better or worse, etc.
So doing a strategic assessmentof all of Australian freshwater
fish is what we did.
So we looked at over 240species and the frightening, the
unwelcome conclusion is that37% of Australia's freshwater
fish are now threatened, andthat figure is only going to go
(34:24):
up.
Okay, because what people maynot realise is that we still
have a third of Australia'sfreshwater fish that don't have
names, haven't been describedyet.
So people are still finding newspecies of fish all the time,
and so generally, it's those newspecies that have been
overlooked before, that turn outto be really threatened.
And so in that mountaingalaxius complex where I said 15
(34:47):
had been described from one, sothe one was not considered
threatened at all.
Of the 15, nine are now listedas threatened.
So that's sort of what happens.
So, yes, we've found that 37%of Australian freshwater fish
are threatened.
35% of the species that weassessed are not on the EPBC
(35:09):
list yet.
So that's the NationalConservation Listing.
So we really need to get ouract together to get those fish
formally assessed under thenational legislation.
So then funds, resources,awareness raising activities can
flow towards those species.
So that's the first thing iswe've got to get all these
things listed.
(35:30):
There was some good news in theassessment.
So Murray Codd, which iscurrently listed as vulnerable,
we think, has now recovered tothe stage where it no longer
merits listing as a threatenedspecies.
Now that doesn't mean it'sfully recovered and it's back to
where it no longer meritslisting as a threatened species.
Now, that doesn't mean it'sfully recovered and it's back to
where it was in 1750 orwhatever, but it means that it
has now expanded its range orabundance so that it is no
(35:52):
longer considered a threatenedspecies and then there was a
couple of other species which wethink can be downlisted.
So a close relative of MurrayCod is Trout Cod.
It's currently listed asendangered.
There's been 30 years ofconcerted, more than 30 years of
concerted action to recoverthat species and we think we can
now get that down to vulnerablefrom endangered, which is only
(36:15):
one step away from beingdelisted.
And so there's a few good newsstories like that.
I guess one of the majorfindings was that the major
threat to freshwater fish inAustralia is alien and invasive
species and that is the areawhere we are putting the least
resources, and we're putting theleast resources there because
(36:37):
it's a really gnarly problem.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
And so many people will have heard of the carp
virus and you know we getcontacted all the time at the
River Restoration Centre bypeople saying when are you going
to release the virus?
And we sort of go back to themand say well, look, opinion is
divided about whether this is atool that we can use what's your
take on the virus?
And whether it's the sort ofapproach that we would need to
(37:01):
take for invasive species.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
So I've always been wary of silver bullets, and the
virus is a silver bullet.
So, yes, overseas, wherethey've had outbreaks of the
virus, it has decimated carppopulations, which is a good
thing, and most of those havebeen in relatively small water
bodies.
Where people have been, theanglers have been able to go out
(37:24):
in their little tinnies andthey pick up dead carp that are
floating on the surface and allthat sort of stuff.
The concern that I have inAustralia is that what happens
if you have an outbreak of thevirus in the Darling River,
where there's very littlepopulation density?
It's a lot of river and there'sno one to go out and pull these
dead bodies out, and so that'sone of the concerns I have.
(37:46):
So if all these fish get rolledat once, then what happens to
the aquatic environment when allthose carp are rotting there?
There's still some modellingand work to be done on that.
As I understand it, the proposalfor the virus is back with the
states.
I think certainly theagriculture ministers are pretty
in favour of probably releasingthe virus.
(38:09):
I'm not sure how theenvironment ministers would feel
about that.
I don't think there's anyconcern about the virus jumping
from carp to another species.
I think the science on that ispretty clear, and so that's not
an issue.
It's really about theenvironmental impacts that will
occur when a whole lot of fishdie.
(38:32):
The other concern is that whensilver bullets are promoted,
everyone takes their foot offthe gas on everything else.
We don't need to worry aboutrestoring fish passage or
mitigating thermal pollution orreplanting riverbanks.
We're just going to knock allthese carp on the head with this
virus job done, and so that'susually not a good idea, because
(38:55):
evolution is a wonderful thingand it will be working seven
days a week to try and develop aresistant car, or the virus
itself mutates and becomes lesslethal, and so then you get
resistance building up, and soall of these you know viral
things, myxomatosis it gave us a30 or-year window where we
(39:22):
could then do other things tomop up the remainder of the
rabbits that weren't infected.
These days, people still lookfor silver bullets.
Yeah, and think in politicalterms, you know, as in terms of
government four years, yeah,yeah, no, yeah, we'll have this
job done, you know sort of thing.
And all of these things aregoing to take decades and
(39:44):
decades.
It took 50, 100 years for someof these species to decline.
You're not going to bring themback just by snapping your
fingers and releasing a virus.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
No, I think you're right.
I think one of the big thingswe do like because we're so now
used to instant gratification iswe want that similarly for
things in our environment, and Ihad the pleasure of
facilitating workshop with theTanarang people down in Victoria
.
They were releasing a newmanagement plan.
It had a 100 year time frameand I thought, well, you know
(40:12):
what?
That's pretty accurate.
It also means that we don't, asthe individual involved, feel
as much overwhelm because we'repart of something bigger that's
going to last beyond us, and Iactually think that's really
important.
How do you keep doing this workwhen you do come across things
like 37% of freshwater fish youknow are in trouble?
(40:33):
How do you retain your mojoreally to keep doing what you're
doing?
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, I'm a slightly cantankerous, stubborn man who
refuses to give in and that'snot the best way to get success.
But certainly you know I'm notgoing to give up.
So I think you know you've gotto get the community on side and
the community will come on side, you know, once they realise
how dire things are.
And so you know koalas.
(41:02):
If you love them or don't lovethem so much and I worked on
koalas the early part of mycareer I do not dislike koalas
at all.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Just getting that on the record.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
I'm just getting that on the record, all right.
I do not want anycorrespondence from the koala
huggers saying this Linnaman'sguy, you know, he's off the
planet.
So the thing that annoys me isthat people have this and or
attitude.
You know it's got to be onething or another.
And so if you go to a meetingand discuss threatened species
and someone says koalas, it justsucks all the oxygen and all
(41:34):
the funding out of the room, andso then there's no room for
anything else.
Okay, the people who areinterested in bugs or reptiles
or whatever would be the samePlants.
God, not a lot of love forplants other than the iconic
ones Willamette Pine, thingslike that.
And so we've got to get betterat multitasking.
We've got to get better atdevoting funding and resources
(41:57):
to things that maybe aren't thatsexy.
You've just got to keepplugging away and eventually
you'll have a breakthrough, andthey happen few and far between,
and so at the moment I'm in aposition where two pots of money
have fallen from the sky.
I've been waiting over 40 yearsfor that, so I don't think I'm
(42:17):
going to be around when the nextpot falls, or if it falls,
it'll probably hit me on thehead and squash me, so I won't
be around to benefit from itanyway.
But you've just got to keepputting it out there and
eventually someone sees thevalue in the argument you know,
and you get someone on side, alarge group who you've, you know
, haven't had great tractionwith before, suddenly comes on
side and it's fantastic.
You know, land care was one ofthose things, you know.
(42:39):
I mean, can you imagine sort offarmers involved in land care
50 years ago?
No, mate, no.
And so it was a generationalchange, you know.
And so those sorts of thingswill happen and if you can
enthuse, you know, the nextgeneration, the current
generation, about conservation,then job's done, you know then
(43:05):
job's done, you know.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
So, as we bring our discussion to an end, I just
wanted to touch on the positiveaspects that you were talking
about, because we've heard aboutthe stockies.
We've found a new population,which is fabulous, and there's
ongoing work there now toprotect them and to look into
the genetics.
I know a species that's alreadyhad some work done on the
genetics is the Macquarie perch,and we love the maca.
There it is, on your arm, andwe have a population of
Macquarie perch in the river, onthe property that Mark and I
(43:29):
own together.
So can you just give us anupdate on where we're at with
the good old maccas?
Speaker 2 (43:35):
So I've worked on maccas for more than 40 years as
well, and so I've mainly donemy work in the cotter catchment
in the ACT, which is Canberra'swater supply catchment.
So it's intact, the vegetationis good, it has three Soggan Big
Dams on it, but that's a minorthing, and so I've done a lot of
work on those over the years.
But I've also been working sortof at a low level on New South
(43:57):
Wales' biggest Macquarie perchpopulation.
Sorry, I'll recast that Biggestnatural Macquarie perch
population because there weresome that were introduced into
coastal impoundments over 100years ago.
So the population I'm talkingabout is in the upper
Murrumbidgee River, sort of fromabout Cooma for 90 odd
kilometres upstream, and so I'vebeen monitoring some sites in
(44:19):
that population for nearly 30years now, and so I go out with
my little friendly soft nets andI set them overnight and I can
catch 60, 80 young of the year.
So these are the new babies,right.
So I go out and sample in Marchand these fish were born in
November and so they're about 50mil long when I catch them and
(44:40):
I count them and kiss them andlet them go and I think, wow,
I've got a big swag, a littlebaby fish here the population's
doing pretty good.
Over the last five or six yearsI've been doing some more
intensive monitoring of a wholerange of sites out there and
taking the little thin clips.
Every time I do it Didn't knowwhat I was going to do with them
, just put them in the freezerwhich is why there's not much
(45:02):
room in my freezer for ice creamor anything else, but that's
all right and keeping them.
And then the opportunity cameto do the genetics on those and
to give people a bit ofbackground.
This upper Murrumbidgeepopulation it's in steep sort of
rocky, gorgey, well-forestedyou know eucalypt country mainly
private landholders on eitherside, so it's not like it's
(45:23):
overrun by people recreating init or fishing in it or whatever.
But it is downstream of a dam,tantangarra Dam that was built
in the 1960s and Tantangarra Damtakes about 90% of the flow out
of the river.
So I've been out theremonitoring fish and in the last
five years I've collected allthese fin clips.
(45:43):
Well, we've done the analysison the fin clips and the results
are eye-opening, to say theleast.
So one of the sites where Icatch all of these little baby
fish every year.
From the genetics you canestimate how many breeders were
involved in breeding events eachyear to produce those fish, and
science theory says that youneed a minimum of 100 to prevent
(46:08):
sort of severe inbreedingimpacts and you need 500 to
1,000 breeders to ensure thatevolutionary adaptive capacity.
So you want to have a guess howmany fish or how many breeders
there were at my best site atthe top of the river.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
That's the site you've been going back to.
That's the site I've been goingto for 25 years Lots of babies.
Really happy with it.
Really happy with it.
Yep, let's go 400.
Okay.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
So the genetics came back and we did it over three
separate years where we hadenough samples and the number of
breeders was three.
The next year three, the nextyear, 12.
Okay, whoa very closely relatedup there instead of sitting back
(46:58):
and cracking another beer andpatting myself on the back for
what a wonderful job I've donein monitoring this population,
you realise that I've beenmonitoring the wrong thing, and
so that's a real call to arms,because there's still people
that go up there and fish andthey catch a mackerel by mistake
and they don't know what it isand they eat it.
So the number of breeders isnot the total number of fish
(47:19):
there.
The number of breeders is about10% of the number of fish.
So if there's three breeders,there's 30 fish in that pool.
Okay, that could breed and yousort of go wow.
What we also found was that allI did about eight sites along
this 90 odd kilometers of stream, and we found that, apart from
the bottom three sites, whichsort of mixed a little bit so
(47:40):
fish from downstream could swimto the next upstream site and
vice versa, in the middle andupstream sites there was no
exchange of fish betweenadjacent sites.
Now these sites are 5 10k apart.
Macquarie perch can do that inan evening if they feel like it,
and so what it shows is thatthe lack of flow in the river
means that there's lots oflittle barriers in between these
(48:01):
sites, that there's lots oflittle barriers in between these
sites that we didn't reallyknow about, which are preventing
mixing, and so you know we needto mix these fish up a bit.
So the ones at the downstreamsite, the number of breeders
down there was around 120, 130.
That's all right.
It's not great, but it's allright.
But if you look at the top,where you've got three or a
(48:24):
dozen or 15 fish, they're allrelated, they're all in the same
families and they're not mixingat all Then that just shows
well, their genetic diversitywas low.
That shows what I was talkingabout earlier, where they're
just slowly losing genes overtime and so we need to mix it up
.
So one of the things that I'mgoing to be doing next week with
(48:46):
one of the pots of money that'sfallen from the sky, oh, I love
these pots.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
I wish I could find some.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Some of them are small pots, some of them are big
pots.
You know you don't want to haveso much money that you don't
know what to do with it.
I don't think I've ever been inthat situation.
I've ever been in thatsituation, Neither have I.
I don't think I'm at risk ofever being in that situation.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
No, I don't think so.
I'm not either.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Anyway.
So I'm going to start a littleUber service right where I'm
going to catch fish from thebottom, throw them in the back
of my ute in tubs, take them upto the top and let some go, and
so that's going to provide somemore genetically diverse fish to
these upstream sites whicharen't mixing.
And so, anyway, that's mycurrent cunning plan, and we'll
(49:24):
take fin clips of everything wemove and fin clips of everything
we catch over the next fewyears during monitoring and
we'll see whether it makes adifference.
The other exciting thing thathas happened up there is a
colleague in New South Wales DPIhas also been running a
separate project on geneticrescue.
One of these big populations ina coastal reservoir which is
not really meant to be there,but it was translocated there a
(49:46):
hundred years ago forrecreational fishing purposes,
is they're the long lostMurrumbidgee cousins, right?
They haven't had a familyreunion for over a hundred years
.
Okay, you look through thefamily album.
Uncle George from Cooma is notthere.
And so we have been doing thiswhat's called genetic rescue,
where we introduce geneticallymore divergent fish into
(50:10):
populations, and so New SouthWales DPI has been doing this
for the last three or four years.
We did it in the ACT for awhile.
They've done it in Victoria fora while, and we found that some
of these fish that we releasedthere are breeding with the
locals okay, which is great.
And we found that some of thesefish that we released there are
breeding with the locals okay,which is great.
And so the offspring of thosefish because again you can tell
which fish they came from, whichindividual bred, you know to do
(50:32):
this are about twice asgenetically diverse as the
locals, and so that's great.
So we're going to be doing thatagain as well, and so that's
the sort of things that geneticshas allowed us to do, because
otherwise you would have beendoing what another great
terrestrial ecologist describedas counting the books while the
(50:54):
library burns.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Yes, yeah, I can definitely see that.
That is just fascinating, mark,and I know that we're going to
have a lot more people going offto uni to become a fish
scientist, having heard youspeak about the amazing things
that we're doing.
So you're a fish fondler.
You're also a bit of a Tinderservice, but you don't actually
scream beforehand.
You're an Uber driver andyou're Santa.
(51:17):
I don't know how you have timefor everything that you do.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
You've got to have fun in life, you've got to have
fun.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
I totally agree.
So there's three questions thatwe ask at the end of every
episode.
The first one is do you have afavourite river, waterway or
body of water?
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Well, I started off as a snorkeller in Melbourne, in
Victoria, right.
So I grew up on the beach and Iwas a marine snorkeler.
But for the last 40 years Ihave worked on the bidgie in
Canberra basically, and that'smy favourite river, waterway or
body of water and some of thetrips.
So the cotter.
I did my master's on the cotter.
(51:54):
I've done a lot of work on thecotter as well, so that sort of
upper bidgie catchment is whatfloats my boat.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
Yeah, I have to agree , it's mine too.
Where do you feel mostconnected to country and to
nature?
You've got some beautiful artaround your house that I can see
here.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah, so I like getting out in the bush, whether
there's water there or not.
Really I love the desertcountry.
I haven't been out there verymuch, but when I get out there
it's just mind-blowing.
I was asked recently about whatI liked about water and I can
just.
I mean, I have a pretty crappylittle creek at my back fence
here, but every day I go down Ilook at the ducks, I look for
(52:32):
water, rats and things like that, and so just being out in the
environment anywhere, thenatural environment, it's just
all the woes of the world fallaway and you think, wow, you
know, that's pretty special.
So the desert country is great,but I love the high country.
You know, I just like being outin the bush really.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
Yeah, I know that feeling too.
Whenever we go out to thedesert country.
I think that's where I feel awethe most and apparently that's
very important for humans toactually go wow.
I really am small and that'sreally really big, yeah, and
that's okay.
Speaker 2 (53:09):
You go to summit.
Like you know, I spend a bit oftime in Kakadu and the
Kimberley and whatever.
And so there's one side out inthe upper Murrumbidgee which
I've been to virtually everyyear for the last 26 years or
whatever, and it has this redsandstone-y cliff, you know, and
I just think, oh, I'm in theKimberley here, you know, and so
it's great.
It just it's that sense of aweand you never quite know what's
(53:34):
going to happen or what you'regoing to catch or what you're
going to see, and that'sfantastic, and I think we've
covered this a bit.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Really, what drives you to do?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
what you do?
Yeah well, as I said earlier,you know, freshwater fish are in
trouble.
Freshwater environments in theworld are in trouble.
75% of freshwater fish inAustralia are found nowhere else
.
We have a very unique fauna.
It's the equivalent of ourmarsupials, really.
We did some work a little whileago and we documented that 22
freshwater fish in Australia arelikely to go extinct in the
(54:01):
next 20 years, and so my job isto make sure that doesn't happen
, and I refuse to lose speciesunder my watch and, as I said, I
want my grandkids to be able toenjoy them as much as I do.
Speaker 1 (54:12):
Well, hear, hear to that, and I will stand shoulder
to shoulder while we do that,because it's the sort of thing
that really drives me to do whatI do too.
So thank you so much for givingup your time again.
I know you probably got to ownMoonlight at the local shopping
centre now as a Santa to makesure more pots of money fall
from the sky.
But in all seriousness, thankyou for all that you do.
(54:34):
We really do appreciate it.
And, listeners, we'll put somelinks so that you can find out
more.
Mark has a wonderful book,fishes of the Murray-Darling
Basin, which can give you ablow-by-blow account of all
those Galaxids.
There's also a fact sheet aboutthe recent work he's done on
the national populations and afew links there as well, and he
is indeed known as the FishFondler Proprietary Limited.
(54:57):
So that is a company to watchout for.
Until next time, bye.
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(55:18):
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Speaker 2 (01:12):
My job is to protect threatened fish, and it can be a
paid job, it can be an unpaidjob.
That's my passion, right, andI've had immense pleasure out of
interacting, dealing withmonitoring, handling, fondling
fish over the years, and so Iwant my grandkids to have that
same opportunity and I feel thatit's sort of my responsibility
(01:34):
to look after fish, and I thinkthe community would be really
interested in these things ifthey knew what was going on.
Freshwaters around the worldare in real trouble, and
Australian freshwater fish arein real trouble, and Australian
freshwater fish are in realtrouble.
I think we just need to up ourgame a bit, not just worry about
the furry ones or the gaudyfeathered ones.
(01:54):
We need to think about thethings that are underwater out
of sight, and so if you lookafter stocky Galaxias, you will
also be looking after the littlespiny crayfish that are in the
streams, or the weird littlestoneflies or other little
greeblies that don't reallyfloat in my boat, but there's
plenty of people out there thatare stonefly huggins.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Hello and welcome to Take Me to the River, sharing
stories and inspiring hope withextraordinary people who care
for our rivers.
I'm your host, dr Shu-AnneLovett.
Today I'm talking to Dr MarkLintemans.
Mark is a long-time friend ofthe show and of the Australian
River Restoration Centre.
In fact, mark was a guest onour very first interview episode
(02:45):
of this show.
It's a pleasure to have himback to reflect on what's
changed, what's next in fish,ecology, climate, threatened
species and more.
Just before the 2019-20 BlackSummer, bushfires swept through
some of Australia's most uniqueand vulnerable ecosystems in
Kosciuszko National Park.
Australia's most unique andvulnerable ecosystems in
(03:06):
Kosciuszko National Park.
Mark and a team of dedicatedconservationists journeyed to
the mountains on January the14th 2020 to try to relocate as
many endangered little speciesknown as the stocky galaxiad.
Let me do that again.
Mark and a team of dedicatedconservationists journeyed to
the mountains on January 14,2020, to try and relocate as
many stocky galaxies, a smallendangered species, in something
(03:30):
of a Hail Mary.
The crew managed to capture 142of these little beauties, which
would have been affected more bythe violent storms forecast for
the area than the bushfirethemselves.
Heavy rain would wash ash andburnt vegetation into the stream
, smothering waterways,destroying habitat and
potentially depleting it ofoxygen.
(03:51):
Fast forward nearly five yearsand that initial population has
been successfully bred incaptivity due to the efforts of
researchers at Charles SturtUniversity and folks at the
Gaydon Hatchery.
So successfully, in fact, thata small population was released
into the wild at a speciallydonHatchery.
So successfully, in fact, thata small population was released
into the wild at a speciallyprepared site in 2023.
We're going to chat with Markabout what it was like to save
(04:13):
some of those remaining fish andwhat comes next for this
critically endangered andbeloved small-bodied fish.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Thank goodness it's not live.
I can do some interpretivedance, if you like there you go,
leave that one so mark welcometo the show and for all of those
listening.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Mark is a very good friend of mine.
We co-own a property togetherand we have been working
together for a long time now.
He has a wicked sense of humor,but I just wanted to share a
bit of an insight into some ofthe names that people have
called Mark because he does, atthis time of year, look a bit
like Santa Claus.
But when I told my team I wascoming to interview him this
(04:56):
morning, he was described as theGandalf of fishes, and so he
has got a magnificent whitebeard and that tends to spark
lots of interest from everywherehe goes.
So, as a poster child for Santa, can you tell us a bit more
(05:16):
about what you've been doingover the last five years with
the stocky galaxid?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, great pleasure to be here again, joanne Good.
So we've been doing a lot ofwork on stocky galaxius in the
last five years.
The most exciting thing, Ithink, is that we found a new
population of the species in atotally different catchment.
It's only about 30 kilometersas the crow flies from the
original one, but it's 350kilometers as the fish swim, so
(05:44):
it's a long way.
So that's at the top of theGoodredigby catchment, and the
original and what was previouslythe only population is at the
top of the Upper Murrumbidgee,above Tantangara Dam, in a place
called Tantangara Creek.
So, yes, we found a newpopulation and we've been doing
lots of work on that, and sowe've done a population estimate
(06:06):
there for stockies, and so wenow have just over 9,000, we
think fish in this tiny littlestream.
It's even smaller thanTantangarra Creek.
It'd be 80 centimetres wide,maybe 20 centimetres deep and
about 2.8 kilometres long andabout 2.8 kilometres long.
The thing that it shares withthe original population is they
(06:29):
are both above huge waterfalls,and it's huge waterfalls that
keep trout out, because stockiesand trout can't coexist.
One of the other things thatwe've done over the last few
years is the original populationwas infested with feral horses.
And so when feral horses crossstreams, they degrade bank
(06:51):
vegetation, they break down thebanks, they put a whole lot of
sediment and stuff into thestream, and so, while they're
not the primary cause or majorthreat to stockies, when you've
only got one or two populationsleft, you try and do everything
in your power to remove thosethreats.
And so, with the greatassistance of New South Wales
(07:14):
National Parks and WildlifeService, they built two
exclosures around the populationat Tantangarra Creek, and so
they went up.
They were due to go up just asthe bushfires roared through,
and so there was a bit of a dueto go up just as the bushfires
roared through, and so there wasa bit of a delay and they ended
up getting finished in aboutApril that year after the
bushfires were out.
And so we've been back tomonitor the horse crossings
(07:36):
across the stream, and it'sreally gratifying to say that if
I didn't have a GPS with me, Icould not find the horse
crossings anymore, because thevegetation has just come back,
like you wouldn't believe.
That's incredible.
The stream banks and thein-stream habitat is still a bit
trash because it's still fullof sand and gravel and the banks
(07:56):
are degraded or whatever.
So that will take decades ormore to recover, but we now have
the vegetation recovering, andthe vegetation is so important
for little Galaxids because itcan provide 30% of the food of
Galaxids.
So the grasshoppers, the ants,the whatevers fall onto the
surface of the stream and theselittle fish will eat them.
(08:19):
So that's one of the thingswe've been doing.
We've also had a PhD studentwho's just submitted his thesis,
working up there since 2016.
And so he's had a look at ordescribed the breeding ecology
of the species, when they breedand how many eggs they have, and
all that sort of stuff.
He's described the home rangeof the species.
(08:40):
Most individuals move less thanfive metres in their lifetime,
so they're pretty stay-at-homelittle guys.
And even more excitingly is hehas pioneered a new system for
finding waterfalls, and so,because waterfalls are so
important for the persistence ofstocky Galaxies or the
(09:04):
existence of stocky Galaxies, wecan now use LIDAR remote
sensing to find out wherethere's a change in elevation,
and if there's a metre dropbetween pixels or whatever, then
we can say well, there's awaterfall there, so we can go
out and survey for it.
So we have a chance of findingmore populations of stocky
Galaxies, and we have a goodchance of finding more streams
(09:28):
that don't have trout in them,so then they can be
reintroduction sites.
So that's just some of thethings we've been doing.
There are other things, butwe'll move on to, oh, captive
breeding.
We can't forget the captivebreeding.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, but hang on a minute Just before we go to
captive breeding that justraised so many questions going
through my head, so the firstone I wanted to ask was the new
population.
How did you know to look there?
How did you find that there wasthis new population of stockies
?
Because last time we spoke itwas all looking pretty dire for
stock eagle accidents.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Well, it's still looking dire, and if I tell you
the true story story, it's goingto make me look like a bit of a
fool.
So, anyway, here we go.
So I was actually out therelooking for spiny crayfish
because I did a survey for thecommonwealth as part of a larger
project to look at the bushfireimpacts on these spiny crayfish
that live in highland streamsand, as a by-product, whenever I
(10:20):
caught any galaxids in my trapsor electrofishing, I just just
took a fin clip, threw it in ajar, threw it in the backpack,
didn't think about it, came backto Canberra, threw some samples
to my friendly geneticist andhe then rings me up and says oh,
I found something interestingin your galaxia's fin clips.
And I said, oh, yeah.
And he said what do you reckonit is?
And I said I've got no idea.
(10:40):
And he said you've got anotherpopulation of stocky Galaxias
and I just about fell off thechair.
I said you're kidding me.
And so there you go.
So it always pays just to takelittle bits of thin clips or
whatever, because, for thepeople that don't know, stocky
Galaxias was only described in2014.
And prior to that, it was apart of a thing called the
(11:03):
Mountain Galaxius Complex and afriend of mine, tama Raddick,
did the taxonomy on them as partof his PhD and he described 15
galactic species from one, andStocci Galaxius was part of it.
And sort of the funny thing isthat 40 years ago another
colleague, well before my timeactually he was a later
(11:25):
colleague he had rolled, I think, eight or nine species of
Galaxus into mountain Galaxus.
So there's this splitting andlumping that's been going on
over the last 50 years.
Anyway, with the advent ofmodern genetics you can find
different species and then yougo back and look at the
morphology, the appearance ofthe fish, and you go oh yeah,
(11:46):
they are different, this one'sgot this and this one's got that
, you know.
So anyway, there you go.
I didn't even know I'd found itand I had.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
That's fantastic.
How brilliant.
I mean.
That must have been well acause for rejoicing, given that
we're just trying to protectthis other one by putting fences
up to keep horses out.
Like to have one in the wild isawesome actually.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
It was amazing, and so what it does is it gives you
great hope that there are otherpopulations out there, and so
one of the things that is goingto happen in early 2025 is that,
as part of the Snowy 2.0approval conditions, there will
be a broad catchment survey,commence using the new technique
(12:32):
developed with LIDAR andwhatever, and so Hugh Allen, my
PhD student, will be out thereassisting with that, and it will
run over a couple of years andthey'll be looking at a large
number of sites A to see whetherthey can find new populations
of stocky Galaxies, and B to tryand find those troutless
streams which may then betranslocation sites to establish
(12:54):
new populations.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So let's talk a bit more about why trout and
stockies can't live in the samestream.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Well, as your listeners will be aware, trout
are a really popularrecreational fish, and they are
popular because they're apredator.
They chase lures, they eatthings, okay, and so basically
nearly all of the Galaxids areat about the entree or hors
(13:23):
d'oeuvre size for trout, and sothey just eat them.
And you know, like a good-sizedtrout, a 350-millimetre trout
can eat a fish that might be 180millimetres long, and most
Galaxias are less than 100.
So they just hoover them up,and so they literally cannot
(13:44):
coexist together except undersome really special
circumstances.
And so galaxids were the toppredator in the stream.
They were the only fish thatwere up there in these tiny
streams, right?
So if they saw a trout, they'djust swim up to it with their
fin out to shake fins and sayhow you going, mate.
And of course trout would havea different idea.
So they have to be separated,and the usual way of separating
(14:08):
them is a waterfall, and awaterfall of a certain height,
so it can't be less than a metre, because trout jump.
Australian native fish don'tjump very much, trout do.
That's how they migrate totheir upstream spawning
locations and things like that.
So if you find waterfalls, youfind natural barriers in the
landscape and that's where yougo looking for weird little
Galaxids.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
So if you had an unlimited budget, would you be
building waterfalls up in thesnowies to separate Galaxids and
trout, Because we know thattrout are now here, they're not
going anywhere?
But surely there areopportunities there to say, okay
, well, trout can be found here,but not here, because this is
where we want our native fish tobe able to live successfully
(14:52):
and thrive.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
So one of the things you can do is you can build
artificial barriers, and thereare lots of them out there.
There are little stream gaugingweirs that have been built in
the 70s that are now no longerused, and trout may have died
out upstream of the weir in adrought or been eliminated by a
bushfire, and so then you couldgo and you augment those weirs,
(15:14):
you make them a bit higher andthen you've got a place to
reintroduce stockies.
There are lots of naturalbarriers in streams, cascades or
little waterfalls, and again inthe millennium drought in the
Cotter River catchment in theACT, brown trout disappeared
from an awful lot of habitats,and so that was an opportunity
to go and augment barriers orwhatever.
(15:35):
Government tends to move prettyslowly and so unfortunately,
the drought broke before wecould do things like that.
So you wouldn't go out to buildwaterfalls, you wouldn't go out
necessarily to put barriers insort of virgin habitat, but you
find areas where there's abarrier that is probably pretty
effective but not totallyeffective, and you make it
(15:58):
totally effective.
So there's a habitat immediatelyadjacent to Tantangara Creek, a
little place called KyandraCreek, and so I've done some
trout surveys out there and weflogged ourselves along this
stream and we got about half adozen trout in about a kilometre
of a stream.
And so you think, we know,there's a sort of a barrier
downstream so it keeps most ofthe trout out but not all of the
(16:21):
trout.
So one of the options is toaugment that barrier and then
you have to remove the trout outbut not all of the trout.
So you know, one of the optionsis to augment that barrier and
then you have to remove thetrout from the stream and that
becomes controversial becauseyou know, anglers think that
there's a conspiracy theory toeradicate trout from Australia.
We couldn't do that if wewanted to and we don't want to.
But yes, you can go and buildbarriers.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yeah, and it sounds like there's enough
opportunities.
These are really small streams,quite far-flung places as well,
to be able to do that whilstnot really disturbing the
opportunities for wrecked fishesand trout.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
That's right, and so you know.
This stocky Galaxius occurs intiny streams, you know, a metre
wide, 10 to 20 centimetres deep.
Really, you don't have goodtrout fishing opportunities
there.
There's not that much foodthere.
The fish will be small.
If you lose that as a troutfishery or something, you could
(17:14):
not lose very much at all andyou compensate by stocking trout
somewhere else where the damagehas already been done or where
there's no damage to be done.
So the Snowy Mountains lakesyou can be in Jindabyne are
stocked well with trout.
There's great trout fishingthere.
There's plenty of other streamswith good trout fishing.
So it's about trying toalleviate the fears that there's
(17:37):
some surreptitious movement totry and kill trout fishing in
Australia, because that's notthe case.
You've just got to be able toset aside some little streams
for native fish that are highlyendangered and then you can
continue with your trout fishingin other areas.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, so when we look at other species, then how do
fish like the Macquarie perchcope with trout?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
So Macquarie perch and trout usually coexist
because Macquarie perch theyused to occur in the Murray
River and Edward Warkool andplaces like that and there's now
just too much silt, sedimentand water regulation in those
streams that Macquarie perchdon't persist there.
So mackers, as I call them,exist mainly in upland streams
(18:24):
with good riparian vegetation.
They're well shaded, they'rerocky, whatever, and that's also
good trout habitat.
And so while they do coexist,that doesn't mean there isn't an
interaction between the two.
You have very few populationsof Macquarie perch left in the
country.
Maybe there's a dozen or 15.
And so again it's like the horseexclusion.
You want to do all that you canto protect these populations,
(18:46):
to allow them to prosper as muchas they can.
You would not ever attempt toeradicate trout from those
streams because you can't.
But you may stop stocking thosestreams with extra trout
because the science quiteclearly shows that if there is a
self-sustaining troutpopulation in a stream and you
throw more trout in, it doesn'tadd to the fishery.
(19:09):
Okay, the stream is at itscapacity.
You end up with either moresmall trout that you can't
really fish for very well, oryou just don't end up with any
more trout at all.
The ones that you've stockeddie out or don't persist very
much.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
So more isn't necessarily better.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
No, no, not at all.
You want to promote a betterfishery and so fisheries
regulations do that.
So some streams are catch andrelease.
So you catch your trout, youtake your photo, you release it
again, so that trout is there togrow bigger and fatter over the
years and so you have thosetrophy streams and you can have
the bread and butter likestreams or impoundments or even
(19:51):
put and take fisheries.
So in some of the places in theAlps and around the world where
you don't have good spawninghabitat for trout but you might
have good rearing habitat like alake, you put the trout in,
they grow, the anglers catchthem out, it's all good, you
take them home, you show yourfamily you've had a good time
and they stock them again nextyear.
(20:11):
So it's about separating theareas that you want to conserve
and those that you want topromote for recreational
fisheries.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Why do you think people get so afraid of this
idea that somehow all the troutare going to become extinct?
Because I can never recall thatbeing a message that has ever
been shared.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
No, and it's people don't like change.
Ok, and so you know my granddadused to fish for trout here and
we've always, you know, puttrout in the waters here and it
was a mammoth effort to spreadtrout across the highland areas
of Australia.
You know they went in milk canson horseback and all that sort
of stuff.
And so there's that, thathistory, that sort of cultural
(20:54):
element that still persists.
Fisheries don't want to get ridof trout at all.
Fisheries sell a lot of troutlicenses.
They make you know, revenue outof that, which then goes back
into threatened fishconservation or improvements to
trout fisheries.
It's just how it is.
Nobody trusts the government.
It's like they're not lookingafter us, they're just trying to
make money or do something likethat.
(21:15):
And so really it's about tryingto educate people and find some
common ground, and I've dealtwith many people who are in the
trout fraternity and we can havea good chat and all the rest.
On some issues we just cannotsee eye to eye, and that's the
way it is.
It's not animosity.
I don't hide my bent, which isfor conserving freshwater fishes
(21:39):
, and that's fine, but it's justabout reaching that middle
ground where you can say, well,some of these tiny little
streams, they're rubbish troutfisheries anyway, how about we
turn them over to conservation?
And so that's what you try anddo and that message is getting
across.
You know the old guard ischanging.
The new guard is coming in.
I'm part of the old guard.
That's fine.
Trout clubs are now assistingwith planting riparian trees or
(22:03):
doing things like that, andthat's great.
So you look after streams,everyone benefits.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, for sure.
So one of the things you alsomentioned before I had to go
back and ask more questions fromyour introduction was genetics.
Tell me a bit more about thegenetics and the stockies.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Genetics has come ahead in leaps and bounds in the
last 20 years, 10 years, fiveyears.
We're making new geneticdiscoveries all the time.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Why is that Mark?
Is it a new piece of technologyor have we just got smarter?
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Well, people have got smarter, but the technology and
the cost of doing genetics hasdropped quite dramatically and
the pace that you can do it athas increased dramatically.
And so now you can take alittle fin clip maybe two
millimetres by three millimetresfrom a fish and you can tell.
(22:58):
If you've got enough fin clips,you can tell who the brothers
and sisters are, who the parentsare, whether they come from the
same family at a site or from afamily downstream, whether the
families mix.
All of that sort of stuff, aswell as the big science
questions about when did thespecies diverge from each other,
(23:18):
and things like that.
So genetics is really becomingpart of the bread and butter of
fisheries management.
It's shedding insight intothings that we never knew, we
had problems with.
For instance, we can haveanother discussion at another
time about Macquarie perch,because there's some really
exciting genetic stuff that'sjust come out of that.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh well, I think we'll keep talking.
So I'm too fascinated by that.
So just with the stockies, theGoodredigby population, do they
have the same genetics as theTantangra Creek population?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So at the broad scale they do.
They're definitely the samespecies.
So all of the samples clustertogether, so you can see they're
the same species and theycluster separately to the other
Galaxid species.
When you get down to the finerscale, you can look at genetic
diversity of populations, and sogenetic diversity is really
(24:10):
important because of futurethreats like climate change.
So if you have a diversegenetic makeup, it means you
have the capacity to adapt tonew challenges.
So you might have a gene thatallows you to thrive under
warmer water conditions orthings like that.
Or breed a little later in theyear or earlier in the year or
(24:31):
things like that.
You might have better diseaseresistance genes.
So everyone loses geneticdiversity, just by chance.
It's just the way it happens.
It's genetic drift, and so ifyou have isolated populations
that are not connected, thatgenetic drift means that you
tend to lose your geneticdiversity because there's no one
coming from downstream to putthe gene back into your
(24:53):
population.
So you slowly become a littlemore inbred, basically, and
that's not a recipe that we wantto follow under climate change
scenarios.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
So are we in terms of our work on genetics.
With the stock eagle accident,are we at the point where we're
actually breeding orcross-breeding those two
populations?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So we haven't got there yet.
We have only bred theTantangarra Creek population at
the moment.
We've just done some geneticwork on them and have shown that
they are genetically distinct.
I think the Sally's Flat Creekpopulation has slightly higher
genetic diversity, but nothingto really write home about.
In Tantangarra Creek the StokkeGalaxies population is
(25:36):
subdivided by a sort of a steepgradient area, so there's two
what I call flats.
You know level pieces of ground.
So there's one at the bottomand one at the top, and funnily
enough they're called bottomflat and top flat.
We're very imaginative in thefish world, and so what we know
is that bottom flat has slightlyhigher genetic diversity than
top flat, and that's because topflat is losing diversity just
(26:00):
by chance and the bottom flatcan't quite get up there to
replenish it.
So we will probably do somemixing there.
And then what we found withother species is that all of
these isolated populations ofwhatever it is Macquarie perch
they were all kept separate forthe last 50 years because people
(26:21):
were worried about diluting thespecial adaptations that these
animals had to their own habitat.
And so now we realise that bykeeping them separate we're just
losing genetic diversity.
They're getting closer andcloser to winking out, and so
now we want to breed supermaccas or super sooty grunters
(26:43):
in the Northern Territory,whatever it is, and so we're now
mixing our genetic stocks, andso that will improve our genetic
diversity.
We had some concerns whereclosely related species mired
into breeds, so Macquarie perchactually has three species in it
, one in the coastal rivers, onein the Murray-Darling Basin and
then one in Kangaroo River,which we think is now extinct.
(27:04):
So anyway, so genetics isreally a fantastic tool, and we
now have a totally differentmanagement paradigm where we mix
our stocks to improve thegenetics rather than keeping
them separate.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So it really is about that word that we hear so much
nowadays, particularly withclimate change resilience, isn't
it?
It's building resilience intothe species.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Absolutely yeah, Because you're never sure what
individual sites are going to do.
Some might be spring fed, somemight be more prone to wildfire,
some might be more prone toalien fish invasion.
So you're never sure what thethreat is going to be.
But the higher the geneticdiversity that you have, the
better chance you have ofsurviving those sort of things.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
So you know we've talked about threatened species
and I know that you love talkingabout fish.
Other people like talking aboutkoalas or platypus and you
always, always do an eye rolllol, because fish are just so
much cooler.
Why should anyone care aboutthe stocky galaxid?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Well, as I said earlier, stocky galaxias they're
the top predator in theirstream.
Right, they were the top dogs.
You need predators and prey instreams to have balanced
ecosystems.
If you have no predators, thenthe cats take over, whereas the
dingoes will keep them down alittle bit, and so they were a
(28:28):
very important part of thatecosystem.
Why should people care aboutthem?
Well, my job is to protectthreatened fish, and it can be a
paid job, it can be an unpaidjob.
That's my passion, right, andI've had immense pleasure out of
interacting, dealing withmonitoring, handling, fondling
fish over the years, and so Iwant my grandkids to have that
(28:50):
same opportunity, and I feelthat it's sort of my
responsibility to look afterfish, and I think the community
would be really interested inthese things if they knew what
was going on.
And so freshwaters around theworld are in real trouble, and
australian freshwater fish arein real trouble, and so, you
know, I think we just need to upour game a bit, not just worry
(29:13):
about the furry ones or thegaudy feathered ones.
We need to think about thethings that are underwater, out
of sight, you know.
And so if you look after stockygalax, you will also be looking
after the little spiny crayfishthat are in the streams or the
weird little stoneflies or otherlittle greeblies that don't
really float my boat, butthere's plenty of people out
(29:35):
there that are stonefly huggers.
I've seen people with stoneflyT-shirts.
You know, I think that's goinga little too far, but that's all
right.
We all have our littlepeccadillo.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
This is from the man who wears a t-shirt that says
Fish Fondler Pty Ltd.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Well, that's right.
You know, you've got to havesome fun in life as well.
So that's what I've describedmyself as for the last 40 years
I'm a fish fondler.
You know I handle a lot of fish.
Anyway, we digress.
So, yes, stockies were at thetop of the ecosystem.
They're lovely little fish.
It's nice to know that thereare still some relatively
pristine streams out there thatcan support aquatic fauna, and
(30:11):
by promoting their existence tothe general public and everyone
else, then hopefully we lookafter our streams a bit better.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons I love
working in rivers so much creeks, wetlands, billabongs, whatever
you'd like to look whereverthere's a waterway because you
protect one thing and itprotects a whole other ecosystem
around that one thing, and partof the magic is that it's
underwater and you don'tnecessarily see it.
So when I talk to scientistslike you and I get my eyes open
(30:41):
to this whole other world.
It really is quite exciting.
And I know up in the SnowyMountains we've got a number of
really special species like thestocky, like the crayfish you
mentioned.
There's also a dragonfly that'sendangered, that we're also
trying to raise awareness about.
So letting people know thatthese special species are up
there, what are we asking themto then do?
Because we don't necessarilywant them to go and find them,
(31:04):
because there's so few of them,so we kind of have to love them
from a distance.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, you just need to A know that they're there and
B know that they're in troubleand C know what the things are
that are making them in trouble.
You know, I meet people all thetime who don't know that trout
are not a native species.
I meet people all the time whodon't know that trout are not a
native species.
I meet people all the time thatdon't know that carp are not a
native species.
And so by educating peopleabout what the true situation is
(31:31):
, then once you know, thenyou're empowered and you tell
your kids and you might tellsomeone else you've been on
holidays and you went up thereand you saw these lovely little
sausages swimming in the stream.
What are they?
You know, and so people get anappreciation for those sort of
things.
I don't expect people to go outand try and do on-ground
management, but, for instance,there's a subset of the
community that are landholders,broad acre landholders, and so
(31:55):
when you know what the threatsare or know where the special
places are because not all ofthese fish exist in national
parks you know some of them areon private land.
So then you can think, oh well,I won't plow to the river edge
or, gee, I'll plant some treesto put some shade on the stream,
or gee that erosion cut in agully up there.
(32:15):
Maybe I need to do something totry and prevent that
sedimentation going into thestream.
And you can't do that all onyour own and there are
government programs andsubsidies to do that sort of
work.
There's land care, there's allsorts of things that you can get
involved in.
But just to know what's outthere, what the threats are, and
to tell other people, that'sone of the great things that
(32:36):
anyone can do.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Absolutely agree.
Yeah, that's a terrific answer.
Thank you for making that soclear for everybody listening.
So, yes, as Mark says, we'renot expecting you to go out on
ground and do stuff, but justknowing more broadly what's
happening.
That's really important so thatwe know how we can look after
these.
In this case, we're talkingendangered fish.
So I wanted to now just expandto national level, australian
(33:01):
level, because I know thatyou've mentioned a couple of
times that freshwater systems inAustralia and indeed the world
are in trouble, and I knowyou've recently done some work
with the Biodiversity Councillooking at fish across Australia
.
Can you tell us a bit about themain findings for that?
Speaker 2 (33:18):
So many people would be aware that there's an
international conservationlisting process run by the IUCN,
and it's called the Red List,and it uses exactly the same
criteria for assessing whether aspecies is threatened as the
Australian government does.
So we 53 scientists, over aperiod of about the last three
(33:41):
or four years, have done anassessment of all of Australia's
freshwater fish, and so that'sreally important to do them all
at once so that you can actuallycompare apples and apples,
whereas previously peoplenominate one species and then 10
years later, another one getsnominated and they both end up
with the same categorisation youthink.
Are they really the same now,or has the one that was done 10
(34:04):
years ago?
Is that better or worse, etc.
So doing a strategic assessmentof all of Australian freshwater
fish is what we did.
So we looked at over 240species and the frightening, the
unwelcome conclusion is that37% of Australia's freshwater
fish are now threatened, andthat figure is only going to go
(34:24):
up.
Okay, because what people maynot realise is that we still
have a third of Australia'sfreshwater fish that don't have
names, haven't been describedyet.
So people are still finding newspecies of fish all the time,
and so generally, it's those newspecies that have been
overlooked before, that turn outto be really threatened.
And so in that mountaingalaxius complex where I said 15
(34:47):
had been described from one, sothe one was not considered
threatened at all.
Of the 15, nine are now listedas threatened.
So that's sort of what happens.
So, yes, we've found that 37%of Australian freshwater fish
are threatened.
35% of the species that weassessed are not on the EPBC
(35:09):
list yet.
So that's the NationalConservation Listing.
So we really need to get ouract together to get those fish
formally assessed under thenational legislation.
So then funds, resources,awareness raising activities can
flow towards those species.
So that's the first thing iswe've got to get all these
things listed.
(35:30):
There was some good news in theassessment.
So Murray Codd, which iscurrently listed as vulnerable,
we think, has now recovered tothe stage where it no longer
merits listing as a threatenedspecies.
Now that doesn't mean it'sfully recovered and it's back to
where it no longer meritslisting as a threatened species.
Now, that doesn't mean it'sfully recovered and it's back to
where it was in 1750 orwhatever, but it means that it
has now expanded its range orabundance so that it is no
(35:52):
longer considered a threatenedspecies and then there was a
couple of other species which wethink can be downlisted.
So a close relative of MurrayCod is Trout Cod.
It's currently listed asendangered.
There's been 30 years ofconcerted, more than 30 years of
concerted action to recoverthat species and we think we can
now get that down to vulnerablefrom endangered, which is only
(36:15):
one step away from beingdelisted.
And so there's a few good newsstories like that.
I guess one of the majorfindings was that the major
threat to freshwater fish inAustralia is alien and invasive
species and that is the areawhere we are putting the least
resources, and we're putting theleast resources there because
(36:37):
it's a really gnarly problem.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
And so many people will have heard of the carp
virus and you know we getcontacted all the time at the
River Restoration Centre bypeople saying when are you going
to release the virus?
And we sort of go back to themand say well, look, opinion is
divided about whether this is atool that we can use what's your
take on the virus?
And whether it's the sort ofapproach that we would need to
(37:01):
take for invasive species.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
So I've always been wary of silver bullets, and the
virus is a silver bullet.
So, yes, overseas, wherethey've had outbreaks of the
virus, it has decimated carppopulations, which is a good
thing, and most of those havebeen in relatively small water
bodies.
Where people have been, theanglers have been able to go out
(37:24):
in their little tinnies andthey pick up dead carp that are
floating on the surface and allthat sort of stuff.
The concern that I have inAustralia is that what happens
if you have an outbreak of thevirus in the Darling River,
where there's very littlepopulation density?
It's a lot of river and there'sno one to go out and pull these
dead bodies out, and so that'sone of the concerns I have.
(37:46):
So if all these fish get rolledat once, then what happens to
the aquatic environment when allthose carp are rotting there?
There's still some modellingand work to be done on that.
As I understand it, the proposalfor the virus is back with the
states.
I think certainly theagriculture ministers are pretty
in favour of probably releasingthe virus.
(38:09):
I'm not sure how theenvironment ministers would feel
about that.
I don't think there's anyconcern about the virus jumping
from carp to another species.
I think the science on that ispretty clear, and so that's not
an issue.
It's really about theenvironmental impacts that will
occur when a whole lot of fishdie.
(38:32):
The other concern is that whensilver bullets are promoted,
everyone takes their foot offthe gas on everything else.
We don't need to worry aboutrestoring fish passage or
mitigating thermal pollution orreplanting riverbanks.
We're just going to knock allthese carp on the head with this
virus job done, and so that'susually not a good idea, because
(38:55):
evolution is a wonderful thingand it will be working seven
days a week to try and develop aresistant car, or the virus
itself mutates and becomes lesslethal, and so then you get
resistance building up, and soall of these you know viral
things, myxomatosis it gave us a30 or-year window where we
(39:22):
could then do other things tomop up the remainder of the
rabbits that weren't infected.
These days, people still lookfor silver bullets.
Yeah, and think in politicalterms, you know, as in terms of
government four years, yeah,yeah, no, yeah, we'll have this
job done, you know sort of thing.
And all of these things aregoing to take decades and
(39:44):
decades.
It took 50, 100 years for someof these species to decline.
You're not going to bring themback just by snapping your
fingers and releasing a virus.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
No, I think you're right.
I think one of the big thingswe do like because we're so now
used to instant gratification iswe want that similarly for
things in our environment, and Ihad the pleasure of
facilitating workshop with theTanarang people down in Victoria
.
They were releasing a newmanagement plan.
It had a 100 year time frameand I thought, well, you know
(40:12):
what?
That's pretty accurate.
It also means that we don't, asthe individual involved, feel
as much overwhelm because we'repart of something bigger that's
going to last beyond us, and Iactually think that's really
important.
How do you keep doing this workwhen you do come across things
like 37% of freshwater fish youknow are in trouble?
(40:33):
How do you retain your mojoreally to keep doing what you're
doing?
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, I'm a slightly cantankerous, stubborn man who
refuses to give in and that'snot the best way to get success.
But certainly you know I'm notgoing to give up.
So I think you know you've gotto get the community on side and
the community will come on side, you know, once they realise
how dire things are.
And so you know koalas.
(41:02):
If you love them or don't lovethem so much and I worked on
koalas the early part of mycareer I do not dislike koalas
at all.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Just getting that on the record.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
I'm just getting that on the record, all right.
I do not want anycorrespondence from the koala
huggers saying this Linnaman'sguy, you know, he's off the
planet.
So the thing that annoys me isthat people have this and or
attitude.
You know it's got to be onething or another.
And so if you go to a meetingand discuss threatened species
and someone says koalas, it justsucks all the oxygen and all
(41:34):
the funding out of the room, andso then there's no room for
anything else.
Okay, the people who areinterested in bugs or reptiles
or whatever would be the samePlants.
God, not a lot of love forplants other than the iconic
ones Willamette Pine, thingslike that.
And so we've got to get betterat multitasking.
We've got to get better atdevoting funding and resources
(41:57):
to things that maybe aren't thatsexy.
You've just got to keepplugging away and eventually
you'll have a breakthrough, andthey happen few and far between,
and so at the moment I'm in aposition where two pots of money
have fallen from the sky.
I've been waiting over 40 yearsfor that, so I don't think I'm
(42:17):
going to be around when the nextpot falls, or if it falls,
it'll probably hit me on thehead and squash me, so I won't
be around to benefit from itanyway.
But you've just got to keepputting it out there and
eventually someone sees thevalue in the argument you know,
and you get someone on side, alarge group who you've, you know
, haven't had great tractionwith before, suddenly comes on
side and it's fantastic.
You know, land care was one ofthose things, you know.
(42:39):
I mean, can you imagine sort offarmers involved in land care
50 years ago?
No, mate, no.
And so it was a generationalchange, you know.
And so those sorts of thingswill happen and if you can
enthuse, you know, the nextgeneration, the current
generation, about conservation,then job's done, you know then
(43:05):
job's done, you know.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
So, as we bring our discussion to an end, I just
wanted to touch on the positiveaspects that you were talking
about, because we've heard aboutthe stockies.
We've found a new population,which is fabulous, and there's
ongoing work there now toprotect them and to look into
the genetics.
I know a species that's alreadyhad some work done on the
genetics is the Macquarie perch,and we love the maca.
There it is, on your arm, andwe have a population of
Macquarie perch in the river, onthe property that Mark and I
(43:29):
own together.
So can you just give us anupdate on where we're at with
the good old maccas?
Speaker 2 (43:35):
So I've worked on maccas for more than 40 years as
well, and so I've mainly donemy work in the cotter catchment
in the ACT, which is Canberra'swater supply catchment.
So it's intact, the vegetationis good, it has three Soggan Big
Dams on it, but that's a minorthing, and so I've done a lot of
work on those over the years.
But I've also been working sortof at a low level on New South
(43:57):
Wales' biggest Macquarie perchpopulation.
Sorry, I'll recast that Biggestnatural Macquarie perch
population because there weresome that were introduced into
coastal impoundments over 100years ago.
So the population I'm talkingabout is in the upper
Murrumbidgee River, sort of fromabout Cooma for 90 odd
kilometres upstream, and so I'vebeen monitoring some sites in
(44:19):
that population for nearly 30years now, and so I go out with
my little friendly soft nets andI set them overnight and I can
catch 60, 80 young of the year.
So these are the new babies,right.
So I go out and sample in Marchand these fish were born in
November and so they're about 50mil long when I catch them and
(44:40):
I count them and kiss them andlet them go and I think, wow,
I've got a big swag, a littlebaby fish here the population's
doing pretty good.
Over the last five or six yearsI've been doing some more
intensive monitoring of a wholerange of sites out there and
taking the little thin clips.
Every time I do it Didn't knowwhat I was going to do with them
, just put them in the freezerwhich is why there's not much
(45:02):
room in my freezer for ice creamor anything else, but that's
all right and keeping them.
And then the opportunity cameto do the genetics on those and
to give people a bit ofbackground.
This upper Murrumbidgeepopulation it's in steep sort of
rocky, gorgey, well-forestedyou know eucalypt country mainly
private landholders on eitherside, so it's not like it's
(45:23):
overrun by people recreating init or fishing in it or whatever.
But it is downstream of a dam,tantangarra Dam that was built
in the 1960s and Tantangarra Damtakes about 90% of the flow out
of the river.
So I've been out theremonitoring fish and in the last
five years I've collected allthese fin clips.
(45:43):
Well, we've done the analysison the fin clips and the results
are eye-opening, to say theleast.
So one of the sites where Icatch all of these little baby
fish every year.
From the genetics you canestimate how many breeders were
involved in breeding events eachyear to produce those fish, and
science theory says that youneed a minimum of 100 to prevent
(46:08):
sort of severe inbreedingimpacts and you need 500 to
1,000 breeders to ensure thatevolutionary adaptive capacity.
So you want to have a guess howmany fish or how many breeders
there were at my best site atthe top of the river.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
That's the site you've been going back to.
That's the site I've been goingto for 25 years Lots of babies.
Really happy with it.
Really happy with it.
Yep, let's go 400.
Okay.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
So the genetics came back and we did it over three
separate years where we hadenough samples and the number of
breeders was three.
The next year three, the nextyear, 12.
Okay, whoa very closely relatedup there instead of sitting back
(46:58):
and cracking another beer andpatting myself on the back for
what a wonderful job I've donein monitoring this population,
you realise that I've beenmonitoring the wrong thing, and
so that's a real call to arms,because there's still people
that go up there and fish andthey catch a mackerel by mistake
and they don't know what it isand they eat it.
So the number of breeders isnot the total number of fish
(47:19):
there.
The number of breeders is about10% of the number of fish.
So if there's three breeders,there's 30 fish in that pool.
Okay, that could breed and yousort of go wow.
What we also found was that allI did about eight sites along
this 90 odd kilometers of stream, and we found that, apart from
the bottom three sites, whichsort of mixed a little bit so
(47:40):
fish from downstream could swimto the next upstream site and
vice versa, in the middle andupstream sites there was no
exchange of fish betweenadjacent sites.
Now these sites are 5 10k apart.
Macquarie perch can do that inan evening if they feel like it,
and so what it shows is thatthe lack of flow in the river
means that there's lots oflittle barriers in between these
(48:01):
sites, that there's lots oflittle barriers in between these
sites that we didn't reallyknow about, which are preventing
mixing, and so you know we needto mix these fish up a bit.
So the ones at the downstreamsite, the number of breeders
down there was around 120, 130.
That's all right.
It's not great, but it's allright.
But if you look at the top,where you've got three or a
(48:24):
dozen or 15 fish, they're allrelated, they're all in the same
families and they're not mixingat all Then that just shows
well, their genetic diversitywas low.
That shows what I was talkingabout earlier, where they're
just slowly losing genes overtime and so we need to mix it up
.
So one of the things that I'mgoing to be doing next week with
(48:46):
one of the pots of money that'sfallen from the sky, oh, I love
these pots.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
I wish I could find some.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Some of them are small pots, some of them are big
pots.
You know you don't want to haveso much money that you don't
know what to do with it.
I don't think I've ever been inthat situation.
I've ever been in thatsituation, Neither have I.
I don't think I'm at risk ofever being in that situation.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
No, I don't think so.
I'm not either.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Anyway.
So I'm going to start a littleUber service right where I'm
going to catch fish from thebottom, throw them in the back
of my ute in tubs, take them upto the top and let some go, and
so that's going to provide somemore genetically diverse fish to
these upstream sites whicharen't mixing.
And so, anyway, that's mycurrent cunning plan, and we'll
(49:24):
take fin clips of everything wemove and fin clips of everything
we catch over the next fewyears during monitoring and
we'll see whether it makes adifference.
The other exciting thing thathas happened up there is a
colleague in New South Wales DPIhas also been running a
separate project on geneticrescue.
One of these big populations ina coastal reservoir which is
not really meant to be there,but it was translocated there a
(49:46):
hundred years ago forrecreational fishing purposes,
is they're the long lostMurrumbidgee cousins, right?
They haven't had a familyreunion for over a hundred years
.
Okay, you look through thefamily album.
Uncle George from Cooma is notthere.
And so we have been doing thiswhat's called genetic rescue,
where we introduce geneticallymore divergent fish into
(50:10):
populations, and so New SouthWales DPI has been doing this
for the last three or four years.
We did it in the ACT for awhile.
They've done it in Victoria fora while, and we found that some
of these fish that we releasedthere are breeding with the
locals okay, which is great.
And we found that some of thesefish that we released there are
breeding with the locals okay,which is great.
And so the offspring of thosefish because again you can tell
which fish they came from, whichindividual bred, you know to do
(50:32):
this are about twice asgenetically diverse as the
locals, and so that's great.
So we're going to be doing thatagain as well, and so that's
the sort of things that geneticshas allowed us to do, because
otherwise you would have beendoing what another great
terrestrial ecologist describedas counting the books while the
(50:54):
library burns.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Yes, yeah, I can definitely see that.
That is just fascinating, mark,and I know that we're going to
have a lot more people going offto uni to become a fish
scientist, having heard youspeak about the amazing things
that we're doing.
So you're a fish fondler.
You're also a bit of a Tinderservice, but you don't actually
scream beforehand.
You're an Uber driver andyou're Santa.
(51:17):
I don't know how you have timefor everything that you do.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
You've got to have fun in life, you've got to have
fun.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
I totally agree.
So there's three questions thatwe ask at the end of every
episode.
The first one is do you have afavourite river, waterway or
body of water?
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Well, I started off as a snorkeller in Melbourne, in
Victoria, right.
So I grew up on the beach and Iwas a marine snorkeler.
But for the last 40 years Ihave worked on the bidgie in
Canberra basically, and that'smy favourite river, waterway or
body of water and some of thetrips.
So the cotter.
I did my master's on the cotter.
(51:54):
I've done a lot of work on thecotter as well, so that sort of
upper bidgie catchment is whatfloats my boat.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
Yeah, I have to agree , it's mine too.
Where do you feel mostconnected to country and to
nature?
You've got some beautiful artaround your house that I can see
here.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah, so I like getting out in the bush, whether
there's water there or not.
Really I love the desertcountry.
I haven't been out there verymuch, but when I get out there
it's just mind-blowing.
I was asked recently about whatI liked about water and I can
just.
I mean, I have a pretty crappylittle creek at my back fence
here, but every day I go down Ilook at the ducks, I look for
(52:32):
water, rats and things like that, and so just being out in the
environment anywhere, thenatural environment, it's just
all the woes of the world fallaway and you think, wow, you
know, that's pretty special.
So the desert country is great,but I love the high country.
You know, I just like being outin the bush really.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
Yeah, I know that feeling too.
Whenever we go out to thedesert country.
I think that's where I feel awethe most and apparently that's
very important for humans toactually go wow.
I really am small and that'sreally really big, yeah, and
that's okay.
Speaker 2 (53:09):
You go to summit.
Like you know, I spend a bit oftime in Kakadu and the
Kimberley and whatever.
And so there's one side out inthe upper Murrumbidgee which
I've been to virtually everyyear for the last 26 years or
whatever, and it has this redsandstone-y cliff, you know, and
I just think, oh, I'm in theKimberley here, you know, and so
it's great.
It just it's that sense of aweand you never quite know what's
(53:34):
going to happen or what you'regoing to catch or what you're
going to see, and that'sfantastic, and I think we've
covered this a bit.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Really, what drives you to do?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
what you do?
Yeah well, as I said earlier,you know, freshwater fish are in
trouble.
Freshwater environments in theworld are in trouble.
75% of freshwater fish inAustralia are found nowhere else
.
We have a very unique fauna.
It's the equivalent of ourmarsupials, really.
We did some work a little whileago and we documented that 22
freshwater fish in Australia arelikely to go extinct in the
(54:01):
next 20 years, and so my job isto make sure that doesn't happen
, and I refuse to lose speciesunder my watch and, as I said, I
want my grandkids to be able toenjoy them as much as I do.
Speaker 1 (54:12):
Well, hear, hear to that, and I will stand shoulder
to shoulder while we do that,because it's the sort of thing
that really drives me to do whatI do too.
So thank you so much for givingup your time again.
I know you probably got to ownMoonlight at the local shopping
centre now as a Santa to makesure more pots of money fall
from the sky.
But in all seriousness, thankyou for all that you do.
(54:34):
We really do appreciate it.
And, listeners, we'll put somelinks so that you can find out
more.
Mark has a wonderful book,fishes of the Murray-Darling
Basin, which can give you ablow-by-blow account of all
those Galaxids.
There's also a fact sheet aboutthe recent work he's done on
the national populations and afew links there as well, and he
is indeed known as the FishFondler Proprietary Limited.
(54:57):
So that is a company to watchout for.
Until next time, bye.
For now you can subscribe toTake Me to the River.
Wherever you get your podcasts.
Visit arrcau forward slashpodcast to learn more.
(55:18):
That's arrcau forward slashpodcast.
We acknowledge and respectAboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples as thetraditional and continuing
custodians of the country andthe rivers on which we live.
Learn, love and play.
We respect and learn fromelders past, present and
(55:39):
emerging, valuing theirknowledge, insights, cultures
and connections to the waterwayswe all love and care for.
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