(birds chirping) (water lapping)
(tranquil piano music)
- [Matt] It doesn't look like something
that should be in fresh water.
It looks like a cross between a swordfish
and uh
a trout.
And then you see this thing that's iridescent
and shining the way it does
and it just makes you look at everything around you
in a different way.
- [Jeff] If you were to come across a Grayling
for the first time
and look at that
and if you look at that dorsal fin
it's like nothing you've ever seen before.
They're part and parcel of the experience
of the Centennial Valley.
So if we lost them we'd be losing part of the valley.
(soaring piano and violin music)
- I came here in the fall of 2008.
And the staff had been writing
a comprehensive conservation plan.
Part of what was in that plan was to
add Arctic Grayling conservation
at a level that it hadn't been in the past.
- In the lower 48
there were only two Arctic Grayling populations
after the last glaciation.
One was in Michigan
that one's extinct.
And one was in the upper headwaters
of the Missouri River.
So those remnant populations
are glacial relic populations
which means that they were separated from Grayling
that exists in the northern latitudes.
- Grayling in Montana had been petitioned
to be listed under the Endangered Species Act
so that sort of uncertainty
loomed over everything.
- The animosity between agencies was
high.
There was tremendous disagreement
on what was driving the Grayling population
and how best to fix it.
(upbeat guitar music)
- We sat down and talked about
what we wanted to do
as individual agencies
to start to better conserve grayling.
What became apparent really quickly
is we were in the same camps
that people were in 40 years ago.
We sort of took a step back and said
rather than debating about these individual ideas
let's test them all.
We'll let grayling
and their population response
decide which is the best management approach going forward.
- Over the 80 years
three hypotheses kept being put forward.
- We thought Grayling numbers were being challenged
by competition from hybrid cutthroat rainbow trout.
- Another limiting factor
was spawning habitat in the streams.
Whether it was because of land use
or natural factors
Grayling may not have adequate amounts
or high enough quality spawning habitat.
- Another leading idea was winter habitat.
These fish migrate up streams to spawn
and migrate back to Upper Red Rock Lake to winter.
It's a large natural lake but it's shallow
and so when you have a hard winter
you can have anoxic low-oxygen conditions
and the fish die.
- There was information that both supported
and refuted each idea.
- We had an idea of how we could test those concurrently.
And that would just take all of us to get it done.
(determined upbeat country music)
- The adaptive management plan is really just a way
to test different management alternatives.
That's it in its simplest form.
They're described in different ways
hypotheses
limiting factors.
But at the end of the day
we're just sequentially implementing
different management actions
looking at the population response
and then implementing other management actions
to ultimately decide how we can most effectively manage.
- Adaptive management ultimately is agreeing to disagree
and being willing
to test
competing ideas at the same time
with the same project.
- The rest of us just tried to help
in any way we could.
But when they get into the deep mathematics
it's gotta go back to Jeff and Matt.
- Matt and I
literally spent a week
for each model.
We had to go through that process
of thinking about the mechanisms
that were behind those hypotheses
collect the data
the biological information
all the historical information.
And then building a model
that could take the data we collected
and spit out a prediction.
- We then compare
the number of Grayling that showed up
to each model's prediction
to understand which one
is probably most accurately influencing grayling.
(uplifting guitar music)
- For cutthroat trout
what we wanted to do
was see how many grayling would be in the population
at a high level of cutthroat trout
but also kind of a medium
and a low level.
And in order to do that
we needed to
to suppress a population in a short amount of time.
What we did was set up a weir
and culled fish from the population
as they came up during the spawning run.
We also called on the anglers.
- By the second year
the word was out.
We went from one or two vehicles
to 30 vehicles parked in one place
and three people per vehicle.
And
potentially everybody coming back with 10 or 20 fish
all of which are over 3 pound.
People had a lot of fun.
- Things were going along nicely.
We were reducing the number of cutthroat trout.
We were collecting really good data.
But we weren't just collecting data for cutthroat trout.
We concurrently collect data for all of our hypotheses.
(lively guitar music)
- The second test
was to start looking at whether or not
the fish have access
to adequate amounts of stream habitat.
- What we did
was take advantage of a natural fragmenter of habitat
beavers.
They had built over 50 dams in Red Rock Creek
and essentially made habitat that was upstream of those
unavailable to fish.
We notched those dams
in the course of a year
in order to make many many many
more
meters of habitat available to fish.
(exciting violin music)
- There's no way I could help
those two guys
with the mathematics or the models.
But I have a keen interest in history.
Some of the stuff in archival information
really got me to thinking
that that story hadn't been fully fleshed out.
Six anglers caught fully
1,000 Grayling in one day.
We determined
that the route the fish had taken to get to that springhead
had been altered by duck hunters in 1908.
And we had seen in Google Earth
photos
areas of a very curvy sinuous river
just going straight as an arrow.
It seemed odd.
Maybe we just needed to figure out how to put the landscape
back to the way it was in the late 1800s.
Our colleagues who were explosives experts
had it all put together.
And then
time came.
And it was four
three
two
one
(explosives detonating)
Almost immediately
the stream reconnected to the historic channel
and left the channel
that had been created by the duck hunters
a hundred years before.
There was a lot of happiness that the project had gone well.
But until the fish told us it was a success
it really wasn't a success
it was just a story about an explosion.
(ethereal violin music) (light rain falling)
- Going into the winter of 2015/16
we had had
four years of cutthroat removal at that point.
So the competition model was predicting
fantastic spawning run
coming in 2016 for Grayling.
But the winter habitat model predicted
a population crash.
- I actually remember real specifically in 2016.
It was a cold wet day.
Matt Jaeger was there to do his surveys.
We had expected the Grayling to be there by then
we had not caught many in the trap.
And his surveys didn't find many grayling fish either.
- It was really what
winter habitat model predicted.
Our grayling population had declined fivefold.
- And that was hard to take.
- The bad winter and population decline were
undeniably a bad thing for Grayling.
But they were a great great thing for learning.
I think that was one of the first times
that Jeff and I looked at each other and said
"Holy smokes this is gonna work."
- Learning that
winter habitat
may be the limiting factor
is in a lot of ways positive.
It helps us understand what we need to do moving forward
to ensure that Grayling stay in this valley.
(serene piano music)
- As the Project Leader of a national wildlife refuge.
My job is to try to conserve
the wildlife that are native here
and try to recover those that are struggling
and lead the staff to figure out how to do that best.
I was just in my office
and I got a text from Jason
and he had a picture connected to it.
- There's one
- Yeah! (others exclaiming)
- Age one Grayling
- He explained that they had caught a Grayling
in the springhead
and this was him.
It actually took me a little bit
to really understand.
This is what we'd been
looking for.
This is what we were hoping for.
And
this hadn't happened in a long time.
This adaptive management
has brought to the table
history
science
on-the-ground management
different agencies
and problem-solving at a level
that transcends careers.
I think the future for Grayling here is bright
because we're on the right track.
We're looking at all aspects
we have all these hypotheses
and these models.
1,000 grayling coming up Red Rock Creek
will some day not just be a goal
it'll be something we can accomplish
with relative confidence each year.