What's a Chesapeake logperch, and why are so many agencies trying to save it?

Efforts are underway to prevent the Chesapeake logperch, found only in southeastern Pennsylvania and Maryland, from becoming a federally endangered species.

Jay Stauffer, distinguished professor of ichthyology at Penn State University, said the small forage fish is believed to only live in the Susquehanna River drainage area toward the Chesapeake Bay. The fish already live in Pennsylvania from Holtwood Dam and in Maryland at the Conowingo Pond to the flats near the Chesapeake Bay. The range did extend north to Columbia in the past but was extirpated.

“We don’t know why they disappeared, but they did disappear,” Stauffer said about the northern range population that stopped near the York Haven Dam. The fish also at one time lived in the lower Potomac River in Virginia and Maryland.

Doug Fischer, nongame fisheries biologist with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, said the project team has several goals involving the Chesapeake logperch.

“The primary one has been to repopulate the area from which these fish are now excluded. To do that we’ve taken a three-prong approach. No. 1 is to fill what we know are knowledge gaps about the fish, the research. We’ve been translocating fish from populations where they are locally abundant and can sustain the removal of individuals, and we’re also utilizing the aquaculture side of things,” Fischer said.

Research and scuba-dive exploration lead researchers to believe the Chesapeake logperch lives only in this region of Pennsylvania and Maryland. They are a threatened species in both states. If the reintroduction effort is successful, Fischer said the logperch will not have to be listed as threatened or endangered federally.

The researchers have been moving some of the fish to their former areas, but they have to be careful not to create a new problem area. “With a rare fish you can only remove so many individuals from an abundant population before you start to deplete it,” Fischer said.

The effort, funded through a $500,000 Competitive State Wildlife Grant, includes the Fish and Boat Commission; Penn State; Maryland Department of Natural Resources; Susquehanna River Basin Commission and Conservation Fisheries Inc. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is providing the funding and plays an important supporting role. The Wild Resources Conservation Fund is also supporting multiple Chesapeake logperch research projects that have been awarded to Penn State.

Hatcheries including the Conservation Fisheries Incorporated in Knoxville, Tennessee, the Fish and Boat Commission’s Union City Aquatic Conservation Center and Fish and Wildlife’s Lamar National Fish Hatchery have been involved in rearing several hundred logperch from brood stock to reintroduce into the river and tributaries.

The group is optimistic the cultured fish will bolster the numbers of fish in the waterway, but Fischer said moving existing populations may have better results. “They (fish caught in the rivers) have all faculties a fish in the wild will need to be successful,” he said.

The introduction area of the river is above Holtwood Dam. “Our strategy has been to pick the highest-quality streams with suitable habitat,” Fischer said.

“We will move as many fish as we think won’t deplete the population. When we do surveys, we gauge what’s there and we don’t want to take too many. So far, that’s resulted in hundreds, so far as translocating fish. We’ll move a couple hundred a year."

“On the culture (hatchery) side, we’d love to have thousands, but we’re not quite there,” he said.

Rob Criswell, a consultant, helped with the surveys and is monitoring some of the fish populations. “We knew there weren’t many logperch around and we realized historically that they occupied the two pools up in Susquehanna,” he said.

With the fish being placed in new areas, the future challenge will become finding fish. “The river is so expansive that they can be reproducing there by now, we just haven’t been able to detect them,” Criswell said about monitoring efforts. Work is under way to survey Chiques Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna River in Lebanon and Lancaster counties.

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“The objective is to keep this fish from being listed on the federal endangered species list because that brings the potential plethora of additional issues for use in the river and the waterways that these fish occur in and to preserve the biodiversity of the state,” Criswall said.

“It’s one of the best smallmouth (bass) streams in the eastern United States and we feel logperch were in those pools above the Conowingo and they should be put back there now,” he said.

Why are Chesapeak logperch important?

Native Chesapeake logperch, members of the darter family, grow only to about an inch long. But they provide diversity to the ecosystem. “It’s not a game species that we are trying to create angling opportunities for,” Fischer said. The small native range had been hampered by habitat destruction and water quality issues that have since been addressed and improved though the federal Clean Waters Act.

“As a conservationist, our goal is to restore it to where it should be, not make it something that’s everywhere,” Fischer said.

Some of the challenges include the effects of four hydro-electroctric dams he said “changed the habitat and river dramatically.” The river, from Columbia downriver to the head of Chesapeake Bay, was a complex river bottom with rock structures creating faster waters. It's now more sediment laden with slower moving impoundments.

Predation is also a problem for logperch. In addition to gamefish like trout, bass and catfish, rusty crayfish also will prey on logperch. “They are abundant in the drainage, including the streams where we are releasing logperch. But there is a litany of other predators that aren’t native,” he said, noting flathead catfish and more recently northern snakehead.

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“These fish are a native component to that ecosystem, they evolved in that ecosystem and that’s where they stay,” he said. “We have a regulatory duty to address things like this to maintain biodiversity for future generations."

The fish feed on the bottom and eat insects. “We may not know all their functions and potential benefits. There’s a lot we don’t know, and if we lose this fish, we’ve lost that forever,” Stauffer said. “Extinction is forever.”

Once there’s an adequate starter population, Fischer said the fish will become self-sustaining barring any natural disasters. “We’re pretty optimistic that we are going to have success,” he said.

Future work

Regarding the future, Stauffer said a search is underway for more funding, including wanting to know more information about their reproduction travel habits. The fish that are released by the project members have tags on them to help researchers know in the future if the fish they find are those they placed or were hatched in the wild.

“I learned an awful lot about them,” Stauffer said. “We are at the tipping point with the Chesapeake logperch, especially with all the introductions that are being done on the lower Susquehanna. I think we can restore the, but it’s going to takes some money and effort to do that.”

Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him at bwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter email on this website's homepage under your login name. Follow him on Facebook @whipkeyoutdoors, X @whipkeyoutdoors and Instagram at whipkeyoutdoors.

This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Are Chesapeake logperch threatened or endangered in Pennsylvania?