New research shows a shrinking environment for some freshwater fish in New York state.
Researchers at Cornell University are finding the Adirondack lake environment for some cold-water fish, like brook trout, is shrinking. Pete McIntyre, an assistant professor of natural resources and the environment at Cornell University, said environmental impacts mean the cold water fish don’t have as much room to escape unliveable warmer surface waters.
“The big discovery in this paper is that there is a contrary push upward from the bottom by loss of oxygen,” McIntyre said. “That loss of oxygen is driven by one of the legacies of acid rain.”
Visually, he said it’s like a room closing in on itself.
“You can think of that as it’s raising the floor for the trout at the same time the ceiling is coming down and it squeezes the trout in between these two inhospitable zones,” McIntyre said.
McIntyre said this is a critical issue for one of the state’s prize species.
“Brook trout are the state fish of New York, they are the most prized fish for most anglers that are residents and/or who are visiting the Adirondacks,” McIntyre said. “So it’s really important to understand how the conditions in the lakes are changing and how that affects the brook trout and brook trout fishing opportunities in the Adirondacks.”
Although this research focused entirely on the lakes in the Adirondacks, McIntyre said it’s not out of the question that similar issues may be occurring in some of the deeper Finger Lakes.
“The general approach that we’ve used absolutely applies to other lake regions,” McIntyre said. “When you take lakes like the Finger Lakes, most of them, not all of them but most of them, are deep enough that they still provide a large habitat for coldwater fish like lake trout or salmon.”
McIntyre said there are already next steps for the research; a new state pilot program SCALE, the Survey of Climate Change in Adirondack Lake Ecosystems, will allow for further investigation and research into the changing environment.
“The vision for SCALE is to assess the changes in the physics, the chemistry and the biology of Adirondack lakes by surveying more than 100 lakes each year,” McIntyre said.
