Displaying items by tag: Tennessee

A young lake sturgeon is viewed through a photographic aquarium after arriving at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute.  Tennessee Aquarium

Tennessee Aquarium welcomes 2,500 baby lake sturgeon as restoration effort turns 25 years old

Casey Phillips is a communications specialist at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga.

CHATTANOOGA — The approach of summer coincided with the arrival of thousands of juvenile lake sturgeon in the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute. 

Biologists at the Aquarium’s freshwater field station welcomed 2,500, 2-inch babies into their care. After a steady diet of bloodworms and brine shrimp, bringing the fish to at least 6 inches, they will be reintroduced into the Tennessee River.

These tiny fish hold tremendous promise. Adult lake sturgeon may reach lengths of 8 feet and live 150 years. 

“They start out really small, so it’s shocking to think how big they can get,” says reintroduction biologist Sarah Kate Bailey. “The first year of life is when they grow the quickest. 

“They grow so fast while we have them here. You’ll go home for the day, come in the next morning, and they look like they’ve grown overnight.” 

A life dedicated to the flora of Tennessee

Dr. Hal DeSelm clambered around the crest of Cherokee Bluff in the heat of a late Knoxville summer 22 years ago. The Tennessee River flowed languidly some 500 feet below. Beyond the river stood the campus of the University of Tennessee Agriculture Institute. The towers of the city center rose to the northeast beyond the bridges of the old frontier river town.

DeSelm was not interested in the views of the urban landscape below. He was interested in the native trees, shrubs, herbs and grasses that clung to the ancient cliffside with firm but ultimately ephemeral grips on the craggy soil.

The retired UT professor, a renowned ecologist and botanist who died in 2011, had been sampling the terrestrial flora of Tennessee for decades. The life-long project took on a new urgency in the early 1990s, when he accelerated his data collection in hopes of writing the authoritative guide to the natural vegetation native to the forests, barrens, bogs and prairies of pre-European Tennessee.

Between 1993 and 2002, DeSelm collected 4,184 data points from 3,657 plots across the state. Many of those plots have since been lost to development, highways, and agriculture, or overrun by exotic species, but he assembled an invaluable baseline of the native landscape. Many of the sites he recorded have since been lost to development.