Blue Ridge Country July/August 2020 - 63

seemed like a dream job."
In her job as reintroduction biologist,
Harris raises imperiled fish and places
them in their native habitats in an effort
to bring back dwindling populations. For
two years, for example, she bred laurel
dace, an eye-catching species with shiny
gold side stripes and lips that turn red during mating season. One of the most critically endangered freshwater fishes in the
world-tomato farming causes sediment
to wash into their streams, suffocating
their eggs-it is only found on Signal and
Lookout mountains near Chattanooga.
"Being able to work with such a really
beautiful and rare fish was a great experience," she says. "And they readily reproduce in captivity, which was really awesome to be able to do."
Even so, the fish are not ready to live in
the wild. "One of the biggest pillars of reintroduction biology," says Harris, "is that
if the issue that made a species go extinct
in that place to begin with is still a problem, you can't really reintroduce them
and succeed. You have to address the
problem before you can do any stocking."
TNACI scientists are currently negotiating with area landowners and farmers to

find best practice solutions that benefit
everyone, including the fish.
One happy-ending story involves the
annual release of young Southern Appalachian brook trout in protected sites in the
Cherokee National Forest in northeastern
Tennessee. (Trout Unlimited, a private
conservation group, is funding the project
through license plate sales.)
"It's always a good day when you're
releasing fish," Harris says, "because you
worked really hard over many, many
months and you see all of that come to
fruition when they swim away into the
river and fulfill the ecological role that
they were always meant to."
As of early April, the coronavirus scare
hadn't slowed Harris' efforts. Longhead
darters, a small species that has disappeared statewide, are actively spawning at
TNACI; common logperch are being propagated to serve as hosts for endangered
mussels; and plans are underway for lake
sturgeon releases in Watts Bar Reservoir
outside Knoxville this fall.
"This kind of work-it doesn't wait,"
she says. "It's very important to us and to
the world."
A UT football fanatic, Harris also enjoys

the animals outside her area of expertise.
"Don't tell any other fish people," she
whispers. "But I am a big bird watcher in
my spare time."
The most challenging part of her job,
she says, isn't the painstaking process of
restoring indigenous fish to the region's
waterways, but the human barriers she encounters along the way.
"We're trying to mitigate the harm that
has already been done to our fresh water
and to the animals that depend on it for
survival, things like pollution, development and climate change. Sometimes you
feel like every time you plug up one hole,
to use the sinking boat analogy, more
leaks spring up everywhere else.
"On the flip side," she adds, "when
we do have a successful reintroduction
and know that all that hard work isn't for
nothing, it's really amazing. The sturgeon
program brings me so much joy because
we put a lot of labor and a lot of love into
raising those fish every year, and then we
go out to sample them in the winter and
we catch them frequently and we can see
that they're surviving and they're growing
and they're moving around through the
system like they should be."

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Blue Ridge Country July/August 2020

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