Jack Schmidt: "This is the nation's river.
And this is everybody's river.
And this is one of the most magnificent places on earth."
Jack Schmidt: "These beautiful, spectacular canyons have been a focal point of national
protection"
Jack Schmidt: "These canyons are also awesome places to build dams"
Jack Schmidt: "This is one of the most heavily regulated rivers in the world.
This river has bigger reservoirs and bigger diversions than just about any other river,
certainly in North America.
We could just walk away from this place as a society and say, well we put all these dams
here we're just not even gonna try to have healthy, natural environment."
Ted Kennedy: "We have the largest population of endangered humpback chub anywhere in the
basin."
Carol Fritzinger: "The humpback chub is just this piece of this ecosystem that remains
here even though it's incredibly altered by the flows of Glen Canyon dam.
I think of it as the indicator species for the health of the whole ecosystem."
Jack Schmidt: "This is a complicated place because it's the clash of a native ecosystem
with a set of physical conditions that that native ecosystem has never had to deal with
before."
Anya Metcalfe: "The largest difference between what the river was and what it is what the
dam has done."
Jack Schmidt: "This river is no longer a sand bedded, turbid, stream.
This is a clear, gravel, cold stream.
This is a stream that trout love."
Jack Schmidt: "it's created a blue ribbon, internationally famous trout fishery."
Jack Schmidt: "We have this huge question, which is: how do non-native trout and humpback
chub live together in the same river?
And is that possible?"
Ted Kennedy: "We've documented that fish are food limited.
Both rainbow trout here and native fishes down in Grand Canyon appear to be limited
by the availability of high quality invertebrate prey."
Ted Kennedy: "People might not think about what supports those fish populations, so I
would point to the base of that food web"
Ted Kennedy: "Aquatic insects have a pretty complex life cycle where they spend their
larval stage in the river feeding and then transform into a winged adult and make the
leap to the land."
Anya Metcalfe: "Really, those swarms are the core energy of this entire system, because
the fish are eating them as larvae, and then they emerge as adults and they are feeding
the terrestrial system as well"
Ted Kennedy: "Things like birds, bats, spiders"
Ted Kennedy: "I think aquatic ecologists are limited in the Grand Canyon with the kind
of questions they can ask based on the logistics."
Anya Metcalfe: "Even though USGS sends a lot of trips here throughout the year, even though
we have a lot of hard working people here, it is impossible to get the full picture just
through those trips.....
These emergent aquatic insects are virtually throughout the entire canyon, throughout the
entire year and to get a better understanding and picture of that we need a lot of specimens,
we need a lot of collection points"
Ted Kennedy: "That's what's so exciting about this citizen science project.
We can tap into the guide's season long access to the river and characterize aquatic insect
emergence in the Grand Canyon all 240 miles of it for the entire growing season.
It really opens up the kinds of questions we can ask"
Carol Fritzinger: "The powerfulness of this citizen science, it's pretty mind blowing.
I mean for the food base program, there's no way that they could gather all that data
on their own without the help of these river guides"
Anya Metcalfe: "We do also get private boaters and educational trips, such as Grand Canyon
Youth"
Carol Fritzinger: "There's no way they could know as much about what they know and there's
no way they could tell the story they can now tell because of the guide's involvement."
Anya Metcalfe: "Putting this dam in changed this river.
It made it cold.
It made the water clear.
And it also deeply impacted the insect fauna."
Ted Kennedy: "We've lost a lot of our aquatic insects.
Things like mayflies and caddisflies.
We think that the Grand Canyon used to harbor a very diverse aquatic insect assemblage and
those are gone now."
Anya Metcalfe: "By understanding what drives these cycles of population and of emergence
we can better understand how this ecosystem functions and if we better understand how
it functions we can better know how to manage it."
Carol Fritzinger: "We have a tool: a dam.
If we could manipulate the flows to maximize insect production, especially at times that
are important for these endangered species, then that's the game of adaptive management"
Anya Metcalfe: "Most of our river guides that get involved are just curious.
They want to learn more about this place they live in at least half the year"
Bob Dye: "Part of it is just being involved a little bit.
Helping and feeling like you're contributing to the canyon, besides seeing what you get...
and it does contribute to the knowledge base, for sure"
Jack Schmidt: "I tell you, none of the science we've done down here in Grand Canyon could
have been conducted without the full support of the guides who make it possible to work
here"