Got questions about the Brazos, no more unknowns. Ever wonder where that water comes from or where it goes? We're unpacking the Brazos River.
Charlie Shugart:Welcome to the inaugural Brazos River Authority podcast, Unpacking the Brazos River. I'm Charlie Shugart, and I'm with our public information office, and we are excited for a new venue to talk about everything from where your water comes from, how evaporation impacts lake levels, facts about the Brazos, the future of Texas water, and so, so much more. But today's focus is on something you might have in your home: fish tanks. Here with me today is Tiffany Malzahn, the BRA's chief environmental officer. Thanks for joining me today, Tiffany.
Tiffany Malzahn:Hello.
Charlie Shugart:Tiffany, this is the first time our listeners are meeting you. So tell us a little bit about your history with the BRA.
Tiffany Malzahn:I started a very long time ago as an aquatic biologist out in the field collecting water quality samples and performing biological assessments at the Brazos Basin. And over the years, have held a variety of different positions within BRA and am currently the chief environmental officer over the environmental program, our regulatory compliance program, and emergency management and business continuity planning.
Charlie Shugart:Awesome, So also joining us is Jeremy Nickolai. Hi, Jeremy.
Jeremy Nickolai:Hey. How are you?
Charlie Shugart:I'm good. Tell us a little bit about your role at the BRA.
Jeremy Nickolai:I am the field operations manager here. I've been here seventeen years. And like Tiffany, I started as an aquatic scientist, you know, doing biology stuff, chasing water quality samples around the basin and things like that. Now I have a team of six aquatic scientists who do all that. And, yeah, that's kinda what I do.
Charlie Shugart:Okay. Yeah. Great. Okay. So this podcast episode is for you.
Charlie Shugart:If you've got a fish tank or thinking about getting one or, I don't know, maybe your bestie can't stop talking about their aquatic pals. Or maybe, just maybe, you just love to learn and care about our waterways. So you've got a fish tank. And let's say this fish tank used to be your happy place, but life is unpredictable, right, and things change. And maybe taking care of your fishy pals might not be working out anymore.
Charlie Shugart:So what then? Where does Bubbles the Goldfish go when his current home can no longer be his haven? And what in the world does that have to do with the BRA? So word on the street is that the last thing you should do with your aquarium fish and plants is dump them in your local water body when you're done with them. Why would that matter?
Tiffany Malzahn:Because a lot of those aquarium fish are not native species to the state of Texas, and same with the aquarium plants. There's a lot of plants sold for aquariums that are not native. Once out in the environment, those species don't have any natural predators, And so a lot of them do very well, and they can do a lot of damage to our environment. One, for instance, the armored catfish is a voracious vegetation eater. So he can, you know, quickly denude natural vegetation that native fish need for nursery areas, cover from predators, everything else.
Tiffany Malzahn:He can completely, consume necessary vegetation. Also, again, nothing eats him. So if he
Charlie Shugart:Nothing eats him?
Tiffany Malzahn:I'm sure there's probably something somewhere that would eat him. A raccoon would probably not distinguish, but in the natural world, there's always balances, and we don't have that natural balance in the aquatic ecosystem for him.
Charlie Shugart:And those plecostomus which are suckermouth fish or the armored catfish.
Jeremy Nickolai:Armored catfish
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah. So that's that's the thing, like, heavy on the armored. You know? They're a little little tough to kill and chew on.
Charlie Shugart:And those are popular in fish tanks.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah. Because they they, like, eat all the algae off the glass on on the fish tanks.
Tiffany Malzahn:And so once they get out there, the other thing, plants are really invasive, and plants are easily transported around the state.
Charlie Shugart:What you what do you mean?
Tiffany Malzahn:So common aquatic plants, we've seen giant salvinia get sold for fish tanks, water hyacinth, hydrilla. And a lot of those, you get them in a water body or a lake, and they can attach to a boat trailer, a kayak, something very easily and be moved from one water body to another. A lot of those foreign plants also have some unique reproductive strategies. So if you see water hyacinth and you wanna go in there and fish it and you run through there with your boat motor and chop it up, every little piece has the capability of regrowing into a completely new plant. So it can get out of control quickly.
Tiffany Malzahn:We partner with Parks and Wildlife. We've got some in, Lake limestone, and we have worked with them for at least fourteen years periodically trying to treat and control, and we can we never seem to fully get rid of it. We might knock it back for a couple years, and then, you know, our lake staff will send me a picture. Is this one? And it's like, yes. It is. And so I know we so far have avoided seeing giant salvinia in our basin, but I know over in East Texas, it wrecks havoc for, lake managers over there and really causes them quite a bit of problems in managing their reservoirs. We do have some hydrilla in the basin periodically too. Fortunately, hasn't ever reached a level that's become a major problem, but it certainly could.
Charlie Shugart:Are there any other popular fish tank fish that we've seen in different water bodies?
Jeremy Nickolai:So you mentioned goldfish and, you know, it's a little anecdote here. We've actually caught goldfish in our biological sampling. And like one in particular I remember, I think, you know, you think of a goldfish, you know, like one or two inches. And so what what is the Japanese pond?
Tiffany Malzahn:Koi fish.
Jeremy Nickolai:So they're goldfish. Is that is that what
Tiffany Malzahn:yes they're a type of goldfish.
Charlie Shugart:Oh, just didn't know that.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I'm pretty sure. I don't remember if it might have been an actual goldfish, but it was probably seven, eight inches long, you know? So these they'll grow out there, and that's pretty atypical, you know?
Tiffany Malzahn:I think we've also seen tilapia, and in one rare occasion, and it was a very unique situation, that there was a fish kill occurring down in the Sugar Land area in some of the man made drainage canals where we actually found lionfish.
Charlie Shugart:Oh. Yeah. They don't belong there.
Tiffany Malzahn:It's just typically a coastal oceanic species from Northern Asia, but they definitely didn't migrate there naturally.
Charlie Shugart:So we talked a little bit about, you know, not being or having natural predators for some of these species. Are there long term impacts of introducing the wrong species to lakes or rivers?
Jeremy Nickolai:That a really good question. So there's, you know, some really big impacts, you know. There's ecological impacts, which we hit on a little bit. There's some economic impacts of, you know, invasive species, and there could be even human health impacts, disrupt food webs, alters the habitat, and another thing is it reduces, like, the biodiversity.
Charlie Shugart:Why is that important? Whether the it reduces the bio diversity?
Jeremy Nickolai:Right. So, you know, this gets into the, like, you know, an ecosystem is like a machine, you know, and if you start pulling parts out of a machine, that machine isn't gonna function like it's supposed to function. So, you know, things like bait bucket introductions. When I was working for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, everybody probably in Texas knows what a red shiner is. In Utah, that is an invasive species.
Jeremy Nickolai:They reproduce so well in the state of Utah that they took up all the habitat for, you know, the woundfin minnow. So what ended up happening is that woundfin minnow ended up getting put on the endangered species list. So, you know, a lot of time and money and effort was spent to try to eradicate the red shiner out of that basin or out of that stream system, you know, to see if they could get the wound fin minnow back up. And that sort of leads into like the economic impacts. And especially for us, and speaking of zebra mussels, which is another invasive species in the basin, because of what they do, you know, they get into pipes and they start clogging them up and stuff like that, we end up having to spend money to try to mitigate the effects of zebra mussels on our infrastructure.
Jeremy Nickolai:And what that ends up doing is raising the cost of our operation, which we have to pass on to our customers.
Charlie Shugart:And zebra mussels also can affect your boat if you are
Tiffany Malzahn:And that's what I was gonna say. It's not even just the infrastructure impact, which is the biggest and most expensive one, but simple little things us as professional biologists who are pulling our boats all over the basin. It essentially requires we have to whenever we put our boats in an infected reservoir, either we have to bring them back and go through an extensive cleaning process, let that boat dry. So, basically, you have to have multiple boats, you know, some dedicated to the lakes with zebra mussels and others not. There's also recreational impacts to it of, you know, if you're being a responsible recreational person, whether it's a kayaker or a fisherman or a water skier, you need to let your gear and equipment basically dry for ten to fourteen days before you go anywhere else with it.
Tiffany Malzahn:You know, we've been somewhat fortunate in the basin and that our drought flood cycle does seem to keep the population somewhat in check because once they are exposed during a drought, you know, high heat and long term, you know, exposure to air out of water will knock them back. So we have some natural population control that other parts of the United States don't experience. So while it's definitely been an infrastructure impact on pipelines, marinas, structures like that, it hasn't been as bad for us as it could be. What you see the states north of us Kansas up to the Great Lakes, it's a real significant disruptor.
Charlie Shugart:So I'm assuming not all invasive species come from your home fish tank. Where do they come from?
Jeremy Nickolai:Well, so, you know, like the zebra mussel, for example, is so it I think they suspect it came in it's a Asian species, I believe.
Tiffany Malzahn:Asian Northern European, and they believe it came in attached on a ship.
Jeremy Nickolai:Or in the blast water of of those ships.
Tiffany Malzahn:Yeah. The ship that was making deliveries into the Great Lakes.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah.
Tiffany Malzahn:And then it has, over the last, I think, thirty years when it was first noticed, slowly marched south and out and made their way down. And there was one time a belief that we were too warm, and they'd never maybe get past Nebraska, Kansas, and their reproductive capacity allows them to adjust their tolerance relatively quickly. And so they marched right through Kansas, got to Oklahoma. It took them a little time. They adapted to Oklahoma temperatures and just have kept marching south.
Jeremy Nickolai:You know, some introductions could be maybe sport fish, you know, kinda blew up, you know, back in the late seventies, early eighties. And they would put, oh, what was it? Spotted bass, like in cold water reservoirs in Utah, and those bass absolutely out competed like the native lake trout and stuff like that. And there's funny things like, there's this big push like, you know, again, late seventies, mid eighties and stuff like that, where they there would be oh gosh, I can't remember all the things, but they would bring in like a bug to eat another bug that was an invasive, and that invasive bug would eat the other bug, and then it would start eating native bugs, you know, things like that.
Tiffany Malzahn:And there's been some of that in Texas. Salt cedar is in our upper basin, and it's in a lot of the upper basins. It was originally brought here, my understanding mainly from The Middle East, for bank stabilization.
Charlie Shugart:Salt Ceder is a tree?
Tiffany Malzahn:A shrub.
Charlie Shugart:A shrub. A shrub. Okay.
Tiffany Malzahn:And so then there was a lot of work to look into what eats it in its native environment. They brought that bug over, and it was effective at controlling it. Honestly, we didn't see a whole lot of negative impacts until the country of Mexico raised its hand
Jeremy Nickolai:Yep.
Tiffany Malzahn:And said, hey. Your bug has crossed the border, and it's eating some of our native vegetation.
Tiffany Malzahn:And it was there are still areas where I think we're using the bugs as potential treatment, but I think it's gone down significantly. And I think it's they're trying to keep it off the border. Like, Jeremy was talking with the fish. We have the same example that he used for Mouton San Marcos. We have the endangered fountain darter, and that those, the San Marcos and Comal Rivers have been found to have tilapia, which is an introduced non native species, and, the armored catfish.
Tiffany Malzahn:And there's a lot of concern and work there on trying to make sure those invasives aren't negatively impacting the federally protected fountain darter. So
Jeremy Nickolai:And to kinda jump in on that on that tamarisk or the salt cedar, why that's a bad thing is it is a transpiration machine and what it does is it basically, it sucks tons of water out so it lives on the flood plain in a river and it sucks the water out of the flood plain which decreases the level of the river. So if you get tons of it, you're losing a lot of water and that's pretty important to us because we sell water. We don't like to see it go out in the air, we like to see it go down into our reservoirs and you know, so we can use it for
Tiffany Malzahn:And they'll grow down into the riverbed and choke the channel and narrow the channel, which then when we get high floods, it can also it's a huge it'll flow the water down enough so you get a lot of sediment, which then reduces your channel and then can create flooding hazards too during times of high flow. It's gonna make things a lot worse when we're dry, and then it also has a negative effect of potentially increasing flooding potentials in certain areas.
Jeremy Nickolai:And I think that's a great point. I mean, it's not just with any of these invasives, you know, it's not a thing that it does. You know? It's usually a summation of forces. You know?
Charlie Shugart:There's a lot of different things.
Jeremy Nickolai:A lot of different things, you know, and, you know, and like the plecostomists, you know, I mean, they will, like, munch on the banks and stuff like that, and kick up a lot of sediment, and it increases the turbidity in the stream, and, you know, degrades the banks so they're easier to wash away. It's interesting the things that happen, you know, they're not good things that are happening, but it's interesting to see that stuff just from a geomorphological standpoint and things.
Charlie Shugart:That was a $100 word.
Jeremy Nickolai:I got more.
Charlie Shugart:I believe that.
Tiffany Malzahn:No. He doesn't.
Charlie Shugart:So do we have a lot of invasive species in the basin?
Jeremy Nickolai:Quite a few.
Tiffany Malzahn:Yes. Off top of my head, we certainly have zebra mussels in Belton and, Lake Stillhouse Hollow, Lake Georgetown, Lake Granger. We've had hydrilla in Lake Stillhouse Hollow. We've had water hyacinth that we still continuously battle in Lake Limestone. We've caught most of the fish that we've talked about, at least in the lower half of our basin.
Tiffany Malzahn:Salt cedar is rampant in the upper basin above PK. We'll occasionally see it during drought times start to kinda get a foothold between Possum Kingdom and Granbury. Luckily, I think there's enough flood cycles that do hasn't gotten a foothold where it's really started to take over and displace the natives. You'll just see one or two pop up here or there, and then we'll have a good flood where the water levels are up, and it'll usually drown them out or scour them out. There some others too.
Tiffany Malzahn:Alligator weed, we don't see it a lot, but it's another aquatic invasive plant. It looks very much like a native plant, so it's really hard to identify. I can't remember the technical name, but we found elephant ears and a few other things in the San Gabriel River.
Charlie Shugart:Oh, elephant ears are really popular for people who have nurseries or like to have plants
Tiffany Malzahn:And it's surprising because a lot of these plants are on the list that Parks and Wildlife maintains that are not allowed to be sold in the state of Texas, but you still can go in nurseries and aquarium stores and find them.
Charlie Shugart:That's a shame.
Tiffany Malzahn:I remember being in Houston and walking by with my mom and was like, oh my god, they're selling giant salvinia.
Charlie Shugart:So, in an instance like that, did you say something?
Tiffany Malzahn:I did.
Charlie Shugart:You did.
Tiffany Malzahn:I don't know if anything came about it, but there was a phone call made So it is definitely a problem and it's a very hard problem to deal with.
Charlie Shugart:Right. Yeah.
Jeremy Nickolai:It takes a lot of time, effort, and money, you know, and
Tiffany Malzahn:And it's repeated effort because,
Jeremy Nickolai:yep
Tiffany Malzahn:you know, Salt Cedar, I will say, Texas Parks and Wildlife in the Upper Brazos has a long term treatment plan they're working on, some chemicals. For a while, they were using the salt cedar beetle, which was the beetle that caused problems in Mexico. They're having some effects, but I don't know exactly how much they've spent, but it has been a lot. And we're still you know, we're starting to see some benefits from that. But because it is on all sides of us, it's in the Red River Basin. It's in the Colorado Basin. It's in the Rio Grande up in Oklahoma. It, again, it's one of those that why it was popular back in the thirties or why they thought that was better than native vegetation or necessary, I don't know. But it was used a lot, so it's almost going to be a constant effort. Every state would have to embark on a similar eradication plan everywhere to ever truly get rid of it. And, honestly, that's probably a budget bankrupting endeavor. Parks is working really hard in the Upper Brazos because we have two endangered fish, the small eye and sharp nose shiner, that their only place that they occupy is above Possum Kingdom and the Brazos a little bit in the Clear Fork. They're salt tolerant species, so they're somewhat unique where the salt levels in the Upper Brazos generally.
Charlie Shugart:So when you say, Upper Brazos, where is that?
Tiffany Malzahn:Possum kingdom and above.
Charlie Shugart:Okay.
Tiffany Malzahn:And so trying to maintain water levels in an already dry part of the state to protect those fish is critical, and they're what they call fluvial specialists. So when they breed, they broadcast their eggs onto the water, and the eggs essentially have to have enough water to float till they develop into fry and can swim on their own. So things that are going to exacerbate drought conditions and lower water levels are really important, which is why I think we're getting the, you know, full frontal assault on the salt cedar. But it's going to be a constant maintenance issue because we have it in basins on both sides of us.
Charlie Shugart:So we talked a little bit about, obviously, working with parks, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. I know we keep referring it to Parks, but that is their official name, is the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. On issues at Lake Limestone, are there other ways the BRA's environmental department works with invasives?
Tiffany Malzahn:The biggest piece that we do is monitoring. We do whenever we're collecting water quality samples, we're checking out our sites, looking for invasive species, and then trying to report those. When it comes to treatment and control, a lot of that responsibility per state law falls with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. But we can be the canary in the coal mine, the first warning that we're seeing something move into the basin.
Charlie Shugart:Okay. Yeah. Because talk a little bit about that because y'all's team is all across the basin and able to do this monitoring. What does that look like? Who's doing that in y'all's department?
Jeremy Nickolai:All of us. When we go out to a reservoir, you know, we usually try to tie up to something. So like, buoys and things like that. So with the zebra mussels, they like to attach to a hard substrate. And those buoys are a great hard substrate, you know. So we tie up to the buoy, lean it over and we can see if there's zebra mussels growing around the bottom of it. Before Lake Granger was known to have a population of zebra mussels in it, we would put out settlement samplers, and I mean, you could use soda can attached to some fishing line as a settlement sampler, you know.
Charlie Shugart:That's amazing. Is that what y'all used?
Jeremy Nickolai:No. No.
Charlie Shugart:I mean, I was just checking
Jeremy Nickolai:But, I mean, what we use isn't much, you know, further than a soda can, you know? It's just like some probably two or three inch in diameter plates, you know, kind of stacked on each other, with some space in between them. And, you know, those are a little more scientific because you know the surface area of the plates, and I'm gonna get dorky about this, and you can, you know, figure out how many muscles per square centimeter there are, you know. But basically, we were just trying to see if anything ever showed up on them. And one day, we got a positive hit on it, and we let Parks know, and then they did their thing, and then they officially declared it a a zebra mussel positive reservoir.
Tiffany Malzahn:And I think that's one of the things we didn't mention about zebra mussels that makes them so destructive is they have a unique we have native freshwater mussels in our streams and rivers and our reservoirs. They typically burrow down in the sediments, in riffles between the rocks. Zebra mussels have a genetic adaptation that our mussels don't have as they grow these structures called thistle threads, and that would allow them our native freshwater mussels have no way to attach to a vertical hard surface.
Charlie Shugart:Oh, interesting.
Tiffany Malzahn:But with these zebra mussels, they do.
Tiffany Malzahn:That's another reason everyone is so concerned. We now are faced with, at least in the Brazos Basin, we have one endangered freshwater mussel and one threatened freshwater mussel protected by the federal government. There are freshwater mussels all across the state that are being protected. And the zebra mussels, not only can they use those byssal threads to attach to the side of a water intake structure or the side of a boat or a propeller
Jeremy Nickolai:Or a soda can.
Tiffany Malzahn:Or a soda or a soda can.
Tiffany Malzahn:But but they'll also attach on the hard shells of freshwater mussels, they can, you know, essentially smother out a freshwater mussel bed very quickly by just growing on top of them and using those byssal threads to attach to freshwater mussel shells. And that was Lake Belton was found by a a researcher working for Fort Hood on one in one of the headwater streams, and she found a native mussel with a zebra mussel attached to it. That was the first sign in Lake Belton that we had a problem. And she was out doing some stream surveys at the headwaters and sent everyone a picture, us, Parks and Wildlife, and went, is this what I think it is? And we all went, oh, no.
Tiffany Malzahn:Yes. It is.
Jeremy Nickolai:Those are those jaw dropping moments. Another, you know, impact of the zebra mussels, and I think I read somewhere, and I might be getting the number wrong, that an adult zebra mussel can filter, was it one liter of water a day?
Tiffany Malzahn:I don't know the exact number, but it's powerful.
Charlie Shugart:So the other mussels the mussels we like, the mussels that are important.
Jeremy Nickolai:Are also filter feeders.
Charlie Shugart:Okay. So what's the difference between the good mussels and zebra mussels
Jeremy Nickolai:So you think one zebra mussel that's probably, you know, maybe the size of a nickel, you know, filtering a whole bunch of water. And then you think of how many zebra mussels are in a reservoir, you know, gazillions of them. And they're filtering a gazillion liters of water, you know. And what that does is that they're filter feeders, so that pulls out all, you know, the plankton and all the little bits that other mussels like to eat or even like the small fish like to eat. So, you know, we're talking about like food webs and stuff like that. If little fish don't have anything to eat, the not so little fish don't have anything to eat to eat the little fish and then the fish that eats the bigger fish. So you're losing the base of your food web when you filter out all those little bits. The good mussels have always been here, and they've adapted to our system, and, you know, the bad mussels, the invasives outcompete.
Tiffany Malzahn:Yeah. Our natives don't have the reproductive capacity of the zebras.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah.
Tiffany Malzahn:They don't have some of the reproductive strategies, so freshwater mussels are also dependent on host species a lot of times depending on the mussel to basically they'll use the fish to have their babies hitch a ride to another location. And once the babies get big enough, they'll fall off. So they've got to be ready to reproduce at the right time, encounter the right fish. You know? Because it is very species specific what freshwater mussel and what fish they need. It's not just like any fish can swim by and become a taxi for their babies.
Charlie Shugart:Only certain fish are taxis?
Tiffany Malzahn:That is a real thing.
Charlie Shugart:I love that.
Jeremy Nickolai:It's fascinating. Freshwater mussels are fascinating. You need to get Justin in here.
Tiffany Malzahn:Zebra mussels don't need that. They can just emit their reproductive material into the water, male and female. It mixes and then new babies. So they have just like their filtering capacity, their reproductive capacity of how many babies they can produce in a year It's something like millions.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah.
Tiffany Malzahn:And so they could very quickly outcompete our native freshwater mussels who have to be somewhat opportunistic and try to wait for the right fish to come down. And there's some really interesting videos out on the Internet. You can watch different strategies. Some of them, the Texas fawnsfoot are threatened species. They basically use a little lure that they shoot out, and it looks like a worm or something a fish would wanna eat. And so they're basically sacrificing themselves to reproduce to a certain degree. The fish eats that, swims off with the babies, and then drops them somewhere else. So that's not a real efficient reproductive strategy compared to, you know, there's a male close by releasing their material too, then new babies are formed and growing everywhere.
Charlie Shugart:Well, I've learned a lot.
Jeremy Nickolai:It's I mean, there like I said, it's a very it's a complex Yeah. You know, ecosystems are complex, and then you throw something that doesn't belong in the ecosystem, and it can cause a lot of havoc. You know? It costs money to fix the problem, you know? And, gosh, I could talk for days on , like, you know, different scenarios that, you know, you can get some species of fish that aren't native to a stream, to a particular stream.
Jeremy Nickolai:They might be native in Texas, but and it's spotted bass and Guadalupe bass that hybridize. So, you know, and again, you know, everybody likes to catch fish, but, you know, if you put the wrong fish, it's a very similar species, and they're able to mate, you get a different species, and that's called a hybrid, you know. And so, what's wrong with that? You know, it's like, well, you lose some genetic diversity when, you know, when you when you start ending up with hybrids and stuff. And gosh, we keep focusing on zebra mussels just because they're so prevalent, you know, and thinking of, like, recreational impacts.
Jeremy Nickolai:When when they first got introduced, you know, on the Great Lakes, you know, everybody thinks the Great Lakes are pretty great, and they had like really nice beaches and stuff like that. Zebra mussels came and they ended up when the zebra mussels died, their shells ended up on the beaches and they're really sharp. So people couldn't walk on the beaches anymore, you know, or hang out and do those fun things. And, you know, I'm a fisherman. I love fishing the hydrilla that's in Stillhouse, you know, it holds a lot of fish.
Jeremy Nickolai:But the bad thing about the hydrilla is it grows so much that you lose capacity in a reservoir. So, you know, Lake Stillhouse is a Corps reservoir.
Charlie Shugart:The US Army Corps of Engineers.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah. The Corps of Engineers, yeah. So that reservoir's whole mission in life, besides holding water for us, is flood storage. So you get a bunch of hydrilla in there, and it's taking up capacity in a reservoir. That's reducing the amount of flood storage capacity that reservoir
Tiffany Malzahn:And there are reservoirs. You know, we've been fortunate that it's never gotten that intense on on Stillhouse Hollow, but where it's so intense that, yeah, it'll wrap around and choke up your boat propeller. You can't move through it. It can get so thick that then it becomes instead of being something fish utilize, it can prohibit their movements, and it pushes them to the outside and, again, reduces available habitat.
Tiffany Malzahn:And I think it's important to look at the impacts of these species too in the climate of the world we're in. Our population is growing rapidly. So every drop of water we have is important. So doing everything we can to protect our capacity in our existing reservoirs is gonna be vital. Protecting infrastructure to make sure it's reliable is going to be vital.
Tiffany Malzahn:So trying to not make that goal that's already difficult to begin with because of the population explosion
Tiffany Malzahn:by introducing species is why it's so important that we would like all our basin residents to find Goldie a new home.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah.
Charlie Shugart:Yeah.
Tiffany Malzahn:Don't don't dump them in the stream. Or if you can't find Goldie a new home, just very, you know, kindly, gently euthanize Goldie or try to sell them back to a pet store. Anything other than just dumping them out in the environment because that's just another thing that's going to take resources and make managing the finite water resources we have more difficult.
Jeremy Nickolai:And it I mean, even and it's not just, you know, kind of focused on fish tanks a little bit, but, you know, reptiles, same thing. Frogs, same thing. Snakes are a big one.
Tiffany Malzahn:And and, yeah, invasive snakes from South Africa that people got and then released are decimating the Florida Everglades, decimating their wild populations. It's not just snakes. It's impacting their birds. It's impacting everything else. There's another critter that got loose in Florida that I don't know if we found in Texas or not called an apple snail.
Jeremy Nickolai:Yeah. That's on the Texas invasive list.
Tiffany Malzahn:Is it the apple snail?
Jeremy Nickolai:The giant apple snail or something like that.
Tiffany Malzahn:Yeah. And, apparently, it's also a voracious vegetation eater, but, apparently, a lot of the homes in Florida are stucco based, and it would munch on the stucco and was causing property damage for homeowners. So what was in the stucco that attracted it or if it was just a way for it, that's how it moved up the wall to get somewhere else, I don't know. But you'll see the iguanas also that are loose in Florida, and it is decimating some of our most unique habitat in the nation from released species. So, again, rehome it or gently and as humanely as possible, euthanize it.
Tiffany Malzahn:We certainly don't wanna see that level of issues here. And when you think of all the value that wetlands do in hurricane surge protection and mitigation and floods and all the other native species they support, we certainly don't want that getting into the the wetlands in the lower part of our base in Galveston Bay, Matagorda Bay, really responsible pet ownership.
Charlie Shugart:Yeah. Well, I mean, who would have guessed that dumping your fish tank in the lake could have a impact on the future of water supply? What a wild correlation.
Jeremy Nickolai:You can kind of think, oh, that's a big stretch. But, I mean, it's not. There's real consequences to those actions, you know. And like you said, it's because it's not just a person, you know, dumping a tank, you know, in Stillhouse reservoir, and it's not 20 people doing it. I don't know what the the real number is, but it, you know, if
Charlie Shugart:Right.
Jeremy Nickolai:It happens probably a lot.
Charlie Shugart:Yeah.
Jeremy Nickolai:You know, I don't think there's any study that's been done, you know, to say how many people because who's gonna admit to that, for one,
Charlie Shugart:Not anymore.
Tiffany Malzahn:Right. Right. Well and I would guess the odds of if it was just one or two people, we probably wouldn't know about it because because it wouldn't be enough of an introduction for that species to get a foothold.
Charlie Shugart:And so is Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's got at least two campaigns. They've got the never dump your tank, and then going back to having a boat or a kayak in lakes to have the clean, drain, dry campaign, reminding people to clean it and drain it of water and let it dry so we don't spread invasive species.
Jeremy Nickolai:And we support them in the clean, drain, and dry.
Tiffany Malzahn:Yeah. We're a partner on the clean, drain, dry program.
Charlie Shugart:Alright. Well, gosh, did we leave anything out? Is there anything I imagine you guys could talk for a long time about this.
Jeremy Nickolai:Man, I got stories for days.
Charlie Shugart:Alright. Well, Tiffany, Jeremy, thank you for joining us.
Jeremy Nickolai:I was happy to do it.
Jeremy Nickolai:This was fun.
Charlie Shugart:Yeah. Alright. So if while listening to this information you thought, hey, I have a follow-up question, please reach out. You can email us at information@brazos.org. We're happy to fill in any gaps we missed.
Charlie Shugart:So what Brazos wonders are swirling around in that beautiful brain of yours? Don't be shy. Let us know. We want to make sure we're touching on the things that would be helpful for you. Again, our email is information@Brazos.org.
Charlie Shugart:And with that, we're out. Thanks for joining us on Unpacking the Brazos River.