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The News & Observer
November 10, 2003

Researcher angles to explain fish's ways

Author: Anne Blythe; Staff Writer

Edition: Final
Section: News
Page: B1

Article Text:

CHAPEL HILL -- He calls it fish psychology.

For nearly two years, Bradley Lamphere, a doctoral student in the UNC-Chapel Hill ecology department, has studied the comings and goings of a small fish in the cold waters of the Nantahala River and its Macon County tributaries.

By tracking the mottled sculpin, a slippery, flat-bellied bottom-feeder, Lamphere hopes to better understand the effect of development and pollutants on stream habitats.

" They can really only live in the clear, cold, beautiful streams of the mountains," Lamphere said.

He has spent much time trying to understand why the territorial fish might move the length of two football fields during the course of several months. The fish are abundant in crystal waters, hiding under rocks while mountain trout swim in their midst. But in murkier spots, the sculpin population is minuscule to nonexistent.

" I'm trying to get inside their heads," Lamphere said. "I wish I could just interview them."

Lamphere, who grew up in Miami, spent many a Saturday night during his boyhood on a boat fishing the coral reefs with his father. His interest in fish behavior was spawned there.

But it was not until he was a doctoral student in Chapel Hill that he really dived into the matter.

After getting an undergraduate degree in biology at Pomona College in Los Angeles, Lamphere went to the northern part of the West Coast to help with cleanup of a Superfund site. Then he moved to the East Coast and worked for a consulting firm in Philadelphia that did environmental impact statements for developers and others. That experience soured his opinion of the industry.

" I got a real close look at how environmental impact studies were done, and I didn't like it," he said.

Lamphere retreated, enrolling in graduate school with a goal of someday applying academic theory to real-world problems.

When he set out for the mountains of North Carolina, he was not intent on studying the migration of the sculpin. He had planned to analyze the effect of waterfalls on certain stream populations.

But the small, brown fish kept turning up, so he changed his focus.

Thinking like a sculpin

From 2000 to 2002, Lamphere spent many weekends and summers in the North Carolina highlands. He would don special waders, strap a weird-looking electric charger onto his back and step into the Nantahala and its tributaries.

With assistants nearby, he would send electric currents through small segments of water to shock the fish. The assistants would scoop the stunned swimmers into buckets, give them a tranquilizer, count them and mark them with colorful ink bubbles before releasing them. He tracked them in the warm summers and in the icy winters.

The common thinking had been that sculpin rarely ventured far from their rocks. "They're like classic couch potatoes," Lamphere said.

But it turns out the fish that mountaineers call "mud mollies," "bullheads" and "molly hogwallows" are swimming farther than many thought -- for food, breeding and other reasons. Lamphere's focus was on movements greater than 20 meters.

Over the course of his study, Lamphere said, he tried to think like a sculpin.

He injected ink bubbles into his hand to find out what his marking technique might feel like to the fish. He would eat the bugs and water creatures they did -- mayflies and crayfish among them.

The fish even entered his dreams.

Explaining for a mom

Now, Lamphere is attempting to explain his findings in a dissertation.

" I think it's an excellent project," said Alan Stiven, the UNC-CH biology professor who has been his adviser. "It's cutting-edge. ... He views this as an excellent model system for the study of stream dynamics. It will be very important for the state of North Carolina, and any other place."

As has been the recent fashion for many graduate students and professors in the UNC system, researchers try to show how their studies and findings can benefit the state as a whole.

Lamphere, a lanky guy with a quick smile and a warm handshake, is adept at giving such explanations in language void of the technical terms that keep many scientific findings a mystery to the mainstream. He calls it the "Mom Test" -- explaining his work so anyone's mom would understand.

He offers up what he calls his "environmental protection" explanation for understanding distinct habitats. But for people who do not go for "that environmental protection kind of thing," Lamphere has tailored another response.

" Trout fishing is a huge industry in Western North Carolina," he said. "If the sculpin are doing well, then the trout probably are, too."

Caption:
UNC-CH doctoral student Bradley Lamphere uses a backpack unit that generates electricity to stun fish so they can be caught.
Photo Provided by Bradley Lamphere