Two years into the four-year project, Phil has conducted surveys throughout the Chicago area, including in the Chicago River and at sites along the Lake Michigan shoreline, to determine if listed endangered fishes are still present in places where they have lived in the past and to search for new locations where they may be living today. Among the many other rivers Phil is wading into are the Calumet, Des Plaines, DuPage, Fox, Illinois, Kankakee, Rock, Vermillion and even the Mississippi.
At 63rd Street Beach, where Shedd is restoring habitat, he was working with Great Lakes Action Day volunteers when they found a tiny silver fish that he identified as a banded killifish, a state endangered species. By the end of the 2013 field season, Phil had found nearly 400 individuals representing five threatened and endangered species. But he also noted that other species that had previously occurred in these areas were absent.
The data Phil is collecting will be incorporated into a statewide distribution map as well as be used to update the state’s natural history database. The results of his surveys are also used by federal and nongovernmental agencies to manage aquatic habitats and enforce endangered species regulations.
Phil is supervising field studies of the non-native weatherfish, a popular — and hardy — pet-trade species from Southeast Asia that has spread throughout Chicago’s waterways.
The two-pronged project, conducted by graduate students from Western Illinois University and Loyola University, investigates the prey choices of weatherfish to determine their potential to compete with native fishes and analyzes their genetics to piece together where they came from and how they became so widespread.
More than 180 invasive species have become established in the Great Lakes basin. Weatherfish first appeared, either as escapees or releases, in the North Shore Channel of the Chicago River in the late 1980s. The small, eel-like bottom-dwellers stayed under the radar as they spread throughout the Chicago River, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, the lower Des Plaines River and even wetlands. Obviously adaptable, they are also voracious predators and prolific breeders.
Shedd’s studies of what weatherfish eat, where they live, how they spawn and how they move into new areas will help evaluate the risk they pose to our local waters and inform recommendations for a management plan to control populations and prevent their further spread.