One of the best things
you can do in West Virginia is fish. I did some as a little boy, catching
mostly bluegill in a lake not far from our home in Anmoore, West Virginia, and my
uncle went often up to Elkins for some great fishing up around that area. Mountaintop removal, however, could be removing those fish from the rivers and streams of Appalachia.
A
new study[i]
from the peer-reviewed journal Ecology of Freshwater Fish finds that mountaintop removal threatens the
fish in the stream of Appalachia. Robert L. Hopkins, assistant professor of
biology at the University of Rio Grande, and Jordan C. Roush of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, studied the
effects that mountaintop mining had on six different fish species that live in
different stream ecologies in eastern Kentucky. Unsurprisingly, the scientists
found that populations of four of the species were negatively affected by the
existence of mountaintop removal in their streams’ watershed. Perhaps
surprisingly, the study found that the effect of mountaintop removal was less
dependent on the overall acreage of land destroyed by mountaintop mining in a
watershed and was affected more by how large the individual mining operations
were.
Effects
of Mountaintop Mining on Fish Distributions in Central Appalachia has just been published, so I only have access
to the abstract. I don’t even know what kinds of fish or which watersheds were
included were in the study. I will update this post as I learn more.
[i] Hopkins, Robert
L., and Jordan C. Roush. "Effects Of Mountaintop Mining On Fish
Distributions In Central Appalachia." Ecology Of Freshwater Fish 22.4
(2013): 578-586. Environment Complete. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.
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