Restoring Alabama Rivers

Matt Jenkins: How did you get into fisheries work?

Jason Throneberry: I grew up in south central Arkansas, and there are some pretty iconic rivers there: The White River, the Mississippi and the Arkansas all come together in the Gulf Coastal Plain. I spent a lot of time hunting and fishing and running around the rivers, and my wife and I were whitewater raft guides for 10 years. We’re river people.

MJ: You had a pretty significant shift in your own thinking about species protection and restoration that ultimately led you to TNC. Tell us about that.

JT: I worked for the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission for nine years and went all over the state looking at imperiled aquatic organisms, from cave snails to cave fish, to darters in big rivers, to alligator gar, whatever. I gradually realized that we can manage these species individually, but we really have to work at watershed scale. If we’re going to help these species persist, then we really have to look at the whole picture.

MJ: Now a major focus for you is a $160-million program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build bypass channels around two dams on the Alabama River. A lot of animals depend on a free-flowing Alabama River: sturgeon, paddlefish, mussels, mullet, skipjack herring and striped bass. What were fish migrations like historically, and how has that changed since the dams were constructed?

JT: We know that pre-dams, the migratory fish runs were just amazing. You had [endangered] Alabama sturgeon and [threatened] gulf sturgeon bumping all the way up against the Appalachian Mountains, trying to get up into the Appalachian portion of these rivers.

That doesn’t happen anymore, because these fish can’t do their thing. Not only because there’s a dam there, but you have changed a flowing, riverine ecosystem into a series of reservoirs. There’s no flow variation; there aren’t the big flood pulses anymore. You’ve lost all that.

MJ: How urgent is this effort? You mentioned that the elephant ear mussel is being kept alive only through artificial propagation, and there are big questions about how many Alabama sturgeon are left.

JT: Our research partners have been telling us, “Hey, we don’t know how many more years this population can hang on—or if it’s still there.” If we’re going to do something, the time is now.

So you’re two years into a joint feasibility study with the Corps of Engineers—walk us through the process. We started out the feasibility study with around 26 alternatives—everything from full dam removal to bypass channels to fish cannons to doing nothing.

MJ: Wait—“fish cannons”?

JT: Yeah, so they shoot salmon out of these big, huge water cannons to get them over the dam. It’s crazy, dude.

Anyway, most of the fish passage [work] that’s been done in the U.S. has been done out West. So it’s very specific to salmon, trout—really strong swimmers. You’ve seen trout runs—they’re just flying through the air. We don’t have those fish. So most of the alternatives were scratched from the get-go.

At the end of all that, the Corps of Engineers and TNC agreed that natural bypass channels were the best alternative, because they offer us way more opportunity to mimic what’s natural.