Posted on Wed, Mar. 26, 2008 10:15 PM

The dirt on a fish-saving plan

By DAVID GOLDSTEIN

The Star’s Washington correspondent

The dirt-dumping plan for the pallid sturgeon is a bid to make up for reshaping the Missouri River to make it more navigable for barge traffic, to make the river more commercial.

WASHINGTON | If a story about using 24 millions tons of dirt to save the ugliest fish in North America from extinction sounds, well, fishy, read on.

Because until the state of Missouri and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers settle a dispute over a plan to protect it, the pallid sturgeon will have to get aid elsewhere, or face a destiny of swimming only through the pages of scientific journals.

“We are causing a species to go extinct,” said Steve Krentz, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “That’s not really one of our rights. We should find ways to adapt our activities so we don’t. That’s where the tricky part is.”

The tricky part is what to do with the 24 million tons of dirt from bottomland along the Missouri River that the corps hopes to excavate and later dump into the river. Over 10 years, the corps would build — mostly in Missouri — 22 miles of small “pilot channels” of calm, shallow water, which the pallid sturgeon needs to spawn. It would be digging up enough dirt to fill a line of semi-trailers, stretched nose to nose from New York to Los Angeles and back.

The Missouri Clean Water Commission and other state officials object. The state doesn’t allow developers to get rid of dirt from their projects by tossing it into the river, they contend. And the state has been trying to keep soil out of the water because of concerns about pollution from fertilizer chemicals, officials said

“This is not a bucket-load of dirt,” warned Kristin Perry, who leads the commission.

But Mike George, manager of the corps’ Missouri River Recovery Program, said critics have misunderstood the project. For one thing, he said, the dirt is not all good, rich soil that farmers covet. A lot of it is sand, without valuable nutrients.

George said the corps would also oppose a developer dumping soil from, say, a shopping mall project, into the river.

But the dirt involved in the pallid sturgeon project “isn’t that soil,” he said. “This is soil that the river produced, the river uses and will take back.”

The Missouri River today carries a lot less of this type of soil than it has historically. Dumping more soil into the water would be a benefit of sorts, advocates think. And, they add, the benefits to the fish are needed.

Scientists refer to the pallid sturgeon as the “Dinosaur of the Missouri,” and with good reason. The fish’s ancestors were said to swim in primordial seas 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, meaning they survived while their contemporary, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, faded away.

With a long tail, bony plates instead of scales, and a flattened snout shaped like a shovel, it looks pretty prehistoric. It can also weigh as much as 80 pounds and grow as long as 6 feet. But the fish won’t win any beauty contests.

“Deserved or not, the pallid sturgeon might be best known as the ugliest fish in North America,” according to a Fish and Wildlife Service guide.

But the pallid sturgeon is in its twilight. Decades of dam construction and river straightening has scrubbed the once wild and free-flowing character of the Missouri and eliminated the fish’s habitat, from Montana to St. Louis. Few, if any, juveniles of the species remain. Anglers rarely see the fish . It has been on the federal endangered species list since 1990.

Critics insist they are not opposed to saving the pallid sturgeon.

“Protecting endangered wildlife and habitat is important,” said U.S. Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican.

But he called the corps’ dumping plan “another unfortunate example of the (Bush) administration failing to balance the needs of fish, wildlife, and people.”

The project is an attempt to make up for years of reshaping the river to make it deeper, swifter and more navigable for barge traffic, to make the river more commercial. The fate of the pallid sturgeon was never part of that economic equation. But corps officials — and the corps re-engineered the river in the first place — now admit it should have been.

“There’s always a conflict between wildlife and all the commercial uses” of the river, George said.

The corps wants to build the channels at 12 sites along the river in Missouri, plus more possibly in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. The Missouri land is public, either owned by the corps, other federal agencies or the state.

A test of the channel project last year on a federal wildlife refuge on Jameson Island in Saline County, north of Marshall, Mo., showed that the work did increase pallid sturgeon spawning. The test channel was slightly longer than a mile. Another test along a section of the Missouri River in Nebraska also produced results.

“We … found sturgeon spawning,” as well as other fish, George said.

He said officials in Nebraska and Iowa have approved the dumping plan. The corps hasn’t sought a permit in Kansas yet.

Dirt-dumping critics in Missouri applaud the corps’ success with the fish.

“We have never said we want to stop the project,” said Perry of the Clean Water Commission. “We are trying to stop the dirt dumping.”

Missouri taxpayers are already paying $40 million in soil and conservation taxes to keep soil out of the water. Critics worry runoff from digging the spawning channels could erode nearby farmland.

Beyond that, if runoff contains pesticides and other pollutants, that could lead to fish-killing hypoxia, a condition in which soil nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, deplete the oxygen in the water.

Perry said some soil samples had phosphorus levels higher than “a hog lagoon.”

“Before we agree to dump sediment in the river, we need to make sure we’re not adding to major water-quality problems,” said Mike Wells, deputy director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

George said the corps could possibly find a few projects in which some of the dirt could be used. It used some for a levee, he said. But he said the river could use additional sediment because the dams upstream filter much of it out.

The corps has stopped all work until the state’s objections are settled.

Everyone is now waiting for the results of a new federal scientific study on hypoxia. Bond said that if the study found that dumping soil into the river would not pollute the water, “We’ll have to send out a search party for those in government who have been scapegoating agriculture for years over hypoxia.”

He met recently with corps officials in Washington to discuss the project, but the impasse remained.

“Things aren’t going to change overnight,” said Krentz, the biologist. “It’s going to take patience. Frankly, these fish have been around for millions of years.”

He’s hoping they can hang on for another million or so.

http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/548270.html

To reach David Goldstein, call 202-383-6105 or send e-mail to dgoldstein@mcclatchydc.com