Local scientists had their sleuthing hats on this week after hundreds of silvery fish turned up dead in the Sturgeon River.
Public works staff and researchers from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) recovered several sack-loads of dead fish from a sewer outfall by St. Albert Place Thursday morning.
A man walking a dog first spotted the fish last weekend, says Laurie Hunt, the associate chair of biological science technology at NAIT who is running a 10-year study of the Sturgeon River. The unidentified man alerted a team of NAIT researchers who happened to be taking water samples on the river at the time, and they investigated.
The team found roughly 600 dead fish by the sewer outfall closest to the city’s cenotaph, Hunt says — some floating in the open water, others frozen under the ice. “The whole little channel was full of them.” While most were minnow-sized sticklebacks, there were also a fair number of larger fish such as northern pike and white sucker.
Hunt told city officials on Wednesday, who in turn called in Alberta Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist Daryl Watters.
Watters, who examined the site, says the fish appear to be victims of winterkill — a relatively common occurrence in shallow rivers like the Sturgeon.
“It’s unfortunate, since you don’t want to see young small fish like that taken out before they can contribute, but it happens.”
Winterkill happens when fish crowd into too small an area, such as the small bit of open water by most outfalls, use up all the oxygen there and die. Readings taken by the NAIT team suggest that the water next to the outfall has much more oxygen in it than that in the rest of the Sturgeon, which may have attracted the fish.
The NAIT team has collected the fish with the province’s permission for further study, Hunt says. The team is studying the sex ratios of fish in the Sturgeon to check for signs of gender-bending pollutants.
“We didn’t have a lot of success catching fish this summer,” she says, but this discovery has handily solved that problem.
Winterkill incidents like this illustrate the importance of having diverse fish habitat, Hunt says — if the Sturgeon had a better mix of shallow and deep spots, these fish may have had a better chance of surviving.
“It also emphasizes the importance of beavers,” she adds, as their dams create deep, oxygenated pools in which fish can survive over winter.
St. Albert is now within seven points of its 2020 waste reduction goal thanks to its new green bin program, say city officials.
City waste programs co-ordinator Christian Benson published the city’s 2011 waste diversion statistics Thursday. The numbers suggest that the city kept about 58 per cent of its trash out of the landfill through composting and recycling — about 12 per cent more than it did in 2010 and about seven points short of what it hopes to keep out by 2020.
The city is aiming to keep 65 per cent of its waste out of the landfill by 2020 under its Environmental Master Plan.
The jump in diversion was “absolutely” the result of the new green-bin curbside-composting program, Benson says, which started last June.
“Organic material is not the most voluminous material in your garbage, but it’s certainly the heaviest.” Of the roughly 11,470 tonnes of material the city diverted last year, about 6,265 was organic waste collected in the green bins and at the city’s compost yard.
City environmental manager Leah Jackson says the jump is in line with what the city’s 2008 solid waste review predicted, but it was likely helped by last year’s rains, which added plenty of heavy, wet grass to local green bins. She says it will probably be a couple of years before a true assessment can be made of the full impact of the compost program. Further tweaks and education efforts should be enough to get the city to its 2020 target.
The city is looking for five people to help plan the future of the White Spruce Forest.
City staff put out a call for applicants this week for the new Grey Nuns White Spruce Park Advisory Committee. The group, which will have five public members, will help the city create a management plan to preserve the white spruce forest near Hogan Road from future development.
“Many people use the forest for many different things,” says city parks and recreation co-ordinator Erin Gluck, including bird watching, gas development and off-roading. This committee will think up ways to manage these activities and identify future recreational or conservation opportunities.
Applicants should live in St. Albert, work well with others and have an interest in ecology and recreation, Gluck says. They would be appointed for two years and would work with four city employees, including Gluck and arborist Kevin Veenstra.
Applications are due Feb. 10. Call Gluck at 780-418-6005 for details.
