Yesterday, there was a big gizzard shad die-off in Cherry Creek in Denver, and the Colorado Divison of Wildlife, with their usual intelligence and wisdom, declared it to be a natural event based on the color and smell of the water:
“The color looks fine. We don’t smell anything in the water,” DOW District Wildlife Manager Vicki Vargas-Madrid said.
And another DOW rep had this to say:
A major fish kill that occurred in Cherry Creek in downtown Denver today was a “natural occurring event,” according to Jennifer Churchill of the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
The fish that died were young gizzard shad, which are extremely susceptible to cooler temperatures, said Churchill. Cooler temperatures associated with an approaching winter storm, plus lower waters in Cherry Creek, caused the young fish to die, said Churchill.
Now, I’m no biologist, but I do know enough about science to realize this is ignorance at it’s finest. In science, you don’t just state a hypothesis and expect it to be accepted by the world-at-large. After establishing a hypothesis, you need to collect empirical data to prove or disprove said hypothesis, you need to publish the hypothesis, the data you gathered and how it was gathered, and your analysis of the data to show that the proof/disproof of the hypothesis is statistically valid – at which point your published article is peer reviewed, your experiment reproduced, and if you’re good at what you do, your hypothesis will be accepted as a theory. In this case, we went right from stating a hypothesis to accepted fact.
The night before this happened, the temperature didn’t go below freezing. The day it happened, the high where I’m at was 59.5 degrees F – and at the portion of Cherry Creek where this occurred, the temp is usually 5-10 degrees warmer than the weather station in my back yard due to the urban heat island effect. And though the DOW, the DEA, and the Denver Fire Dept were all “surveying” Cherry Creek, it doesn’t sound like a single person measured either the ambient or water temperatures. Today we have a major snowstorm, so it’s a little late to collect these numbers now.
Nobody measured the dissolved oxygen content of the water either. This was interesting, because yesterday was the last of several warm days, but it was overcast. Another theory would be there was an algae bloom, and the cloudy day resulted in a drastic drop in oxygen. How likely this is along such a long stretch of the creek is debatable, but again, we’ll never know now.
The only test it sounds like any of these people actually took was a PH reading by the fire department. Beyond the question of why the fire department is doing water tests, is that their results had a PH of 7, or “normal” according to the Deputy Fire Chief. The only place a PH of seven in water is normal is in pure, desalinated water in a lab. It would be astonishing to me to see water in a creek, that’s running over rocks and vegetation have a PH of exactly 7.0.
Another problem with the cold theory is that according to the DOW’s fishing report from Oct 13:
The shad has about died off, and the lake is about to turn…The current water temperature is 58.7 degrees and the water levels are normal.
Sounds like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing. Of course, the temperature in the creek will change faster than in the reservoir – but after two previous snow storms (enough cold for the water in the reservoir to turn over), wouldn’t a natural shad die-off have already occurred in the creek by now? Not to mention the DOW contradicting itself on the water level!
But lastly, I’d like to point out that at the least the local media (at least KUSA TV and the Denver Post) failed miserably in their jobs as reporters. How is it that not a single one of them thought of any of these issues and asked the DOW rep who based their theory of the smell and color of the water: “Are you a trained biologist, or a bloodhound?”
Tags: Cherry Creek, Colorado DOW, Shad die-off
Thanks in advance!