AmericanPaddlefish_Complexity_Lowerre_Rick_BoulderCO_31July2020_Reel4030.mp3

Rick Lowerre [00:00:00] You see the cypress living in water. There's, you know, eight to ten thousand acres of flooded cypress in Caddo Lake. It's, you know, in up to a foot or two of water. But it doesn't reproduce in water. When the seeds fall, they can only germinate if they're in dry or moist soil.

Rick Lowerre [00:00:25] So you need a system where the water rises and falls in, at a certain significant time. And in the case of cypress, they've got to germinate, and they've got to get a foot or two high before the water comes back, or they won't survive. And that historically, because of droughts and floods, you had a system like that.

Rick Lowerre [00:00:52] And that's a real problem for Caddo Lake. There's, there's, those cypress trees you find in Caddo Lake, a lot of them are 100 years old, which was, or now maybe 120 years old, and the result of an effort in the late 1800s, 1900s, early 1900s, to change the flow patterns in the Red River, remove some old logjams that drained Caddo Lake, the original Caddo Lake.

Rick Lowerre [00:01:31] And so for a while, Caddo Lake was way below what it is now. And that, you know, that was a natural.

Rick Lowerre [00:01:40] Then in the early 1900s, the Corps of Engineers was convinced to put a dam at Caddo Lake, which raised the lake and made it a constant, more of a constant-level lake. Before that, it had been a natural system that was, that would flood and dry. And that's why we had all these cypress trees that were, you know, ranged from 100 to 400 years old.

Rick Lowerre [00:02:06] And the Caddo Lake Institute did a lot of work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on on how do we assure that generations down the road are going to still have cypress trees in Caddo Lake. And it's not an easy matter, but it really does have to do with the amount of water and the timing of water.

Rick Lowerre [00:02:29] So that's a different need than the flows, the pulse flows, that paddlefish need for their spawning.

Rick Lowerre [00:02:39] So it's it's very complex.

Rick Lowerre [00:02:41] And you look at, you know, things like mussels and what they need, and alligator snapping turtles and what they need.

Rick Lowerre [00:02:51] It's, you know, it's a very complex system that, to some extent, doing something to help one can hurt another. And so we had to look at how do we best balance those matters and the flow needs.

Rick Lowerre [00:03:08] And the end result really is we needed to sort of mimic the historic flows. That's what gave us the diversity and protected all these species. And in some extent, you know, assured that some species didn't take over.