The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service is proposing new protections for two threatened species of crayfish found in the Appalachian coalfields.
Under the new proposed rule, set to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the agency will designate 445 miles of streams in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia as “critical habitat” for the Guyandotte River crayfish and Big Sandy crayfish.
Both species have lost much of their habitat across Appalachia due to water pollution from mountaintop coal mining.
The proposal includes more than 360 miles of stream for the Big Sandy crayfish in Martin and Pike Counties, Kentucky; Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise Counties, Virginia; and McDowell, Mingo, and Wayne Counties, West Virginia.
Eighty-four miles of stream in Logan and Wyoming Counties, West Virginia, are proposed as critical habitat for the Guyandotte River crayfish. Researchers have confirmed the Guyandotte River crayfish has lost more than 90 percent of its range and is now found only in two streams in Wyoming County.
“This really is a ray of light for both of these species’ chances at survival into the future,” said Perrin de Jong, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
The environmental group took legal action against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regarding the two crayfish species. The crayfish were protected in 2016 under the Endangered Species Act.
“This is going to create extra layers of protection for anyone who wants to go in and muck up their existing habitat, where they live today,” de Jong said. “And it’s also going to create critical tools for protecting the habitat that they will need to expand into in order to really have a long-term chance of survival as a species.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service will accept public comments on the proposal for 60 days.
The West Virginia Division of Highways is providing nearly $180,000 to West Liberty University to determine the effects of construction activities on endangered crayfish.
The West Virginia Division of Highways, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and West Liberty University are working together to move two protected crayfish species from bridge updates and replacements occurring in the next several years.
“The Division of Highways is thrilled to be part of an initiative that will benefit so many people as well as a native West Virginia species,” WVDOH Natural Resource Unit leader Traci Cummings said in a press release.
WVDOH endangered species specialist Sydney Burke added, “Transportation projects give us opportunities to work on rare wildlife in the area, and to find ways to conserve those species while ensuring the state’s roads and bridges are up to date and safe.”
The conservation initiative in the Big Sandy River watershed will begin in 2020. Undergraduate and graduate students from WLU Professor Zachary Loughman’s lab conducting field work with crayfish.
“My students and I want to do everything we can to get the word out about crayfish, why they’re important and what we need to do to save them,” Loughman said. “Through this initiative, we are excited to foster the connection communities already have with the streams and rivers in this region.
Students from West Liberty will track crayfish movements to better understand how they live, how they respond to bridge construction, and how the Division of Highways can improve bridge design and construction process to lessen the impacts on the populations.
The crayfish were protected in 2016 under the Endangered Species Act.
Ongoing erosion and sedimentation have made many streams within the region uninhabitable for the species. The Big Sandy crayfish (Cambarus callainus) is found in six isolated populations across Floyd and Pike counties, Kentucky; Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise counties, Virginia; and McDowell and Mingo counties, West Virginia. The Guyandotte River crayfish (Cambarus veteranus) is found in only two streams in Wyoming County, West Virginia.
In a press release, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote tips on how anyone can help keep streams healthy for crayfish, trout and other wildlife:
Drive ATVs and vehicles on designated trails and not through or in streams.
Don’t dump chemicals into streams and report chemical spills to state environmental protection agencies.
During timber harvest, construction, or other projects, implement best management practices for sediment and erosion control.
Start a watershed group or assist in stream and water quality monitoring efforts.
Plant trees and other native woody vegetation along stream banks to help restore and preserve water quality.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will decide over the next six months whether to follow through with a Trump administration executive order that would dramatically change federal protections for such streams and wetlands.
The proposed revision would roll back an expanded Clean Water Act rule from the Obama administration, that included protections for ephemeral streams and wetlands in something called the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS.
In the Trump administration’s revision, ephemeral streams and wetlands would not be protected, and that concerns West Liberty University Professor Zachary Loughman.
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Loughman poses with a crayfish at his laboratory at West Liberty University, West Virginia.
Loughman has dedicated his professional life to crustaceans – specifically freshwater crayfish. He dips his hand into one of the water tanks at his laboratory near Wheeling, West Virginia, to pick up a teal crayfish the size of a dollar bill.
“See the little guy dropping down? We caught mom and she had 300 babies. So we just let them grow,” Loughman said. “We’ve had our feet – my lab – in over 3000 rivers in the past ten years.”
His team has been all over Appalachia and the Ohio Valley searching streams, wetlands, and marshes to document thousands of crayfish, some of them undiscovered species. His students even named one after him.
“So when we’re out looking for our crawfish, we’re flipping rocks and letting our ‘inner ten-year-old’ fly, but we’re doing it in a scientific way,” Loughman said. “I got to go to all the places I love to be, because I like water, so.”
Yet with each new species Loughman discovers, he worries that the habitats of these unique animals may be at risk in the future. Some crayfish he studies live in wetlands and streams that are considered “ephemeral,” which means they only occasionally have water during events like heavy rainfall.
“I don’t know a single aquatic conservationist or biologist – and I know a lot of those kind of people – who thinks ‘yeah, this rule is great.’ I don’t know anybody who thinks this rule is good, or even OK,” Loughman said. “So when you have an entire community of people whose job it is to generate the science that this rule is based off of, that are all unified and are emphatically saying, ‘this is a disaster,’ then that is a tremendous amount of evidence that this is a disaster.”
Members of the EPA Science Advisory Board in early June questioned the science backing the Trump administration’s revised WOTUS rule.
Credit Trout Unlimited
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Trout Unlimited
Trout Unlimited advocates for the Obama-era version of the WOTUS rule.
Scientists and biologists, including Loughman, worry that if ephemeral streams and wetlands don’t have federal protection, it could lead to pollution of watersheds, a loss of water quality and aquatic wildlife, and the potential for more dangerous flash flooding as climate change intensifies.
Yet some Ohio Valley farmers, coal companies, and land developers worry that expanded federal protections will bring burdensome federal regulation.
Connected Watershed
The EPA received over 600,000 public comments this spring on the Trump administration’s revised WOTUS definition, including from the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Association, the Kentucky Coal Association, and the Kentucky Waterways Alliance.
Some comments criticizing the proposed rule change cited the work of Ohio State University School of Environment and Natural Resources Professor Mazeika Sullivan, who has studied wetlands throughout Ohio and contributed to a study on the ecological role of the nation’s ephemeral waterways.
“If this were to go into law, we’d lose protections for millions of acres of wetlands. Millions of miles of streams,” Sullivan said. “I think folks don’t necessarily understand just the services they provide.”
He said one benefit ephemeral streams offer in the Ohio Valley is to buffer against flash flooding, holding back heavy precipitation. If more ephemeral streams are eliminated because of a lack of federal protection, then the possibility of flash floods increases.
Sullivan said the Ohio Valley could see more streams become ephemeral in the future, as climate change is predicted to increase drought conditions.
“An intermittent stream today could become an ephemeral stream in the future, and then it would fall out of protection,” Sullivan said. “And we’re seeing that, at least anecdotally, in areas of Ohio.”
Sullivan also helped review a 2015 EPA report that detailed how ephemeral streams and wetlands, while not having regular flowing water, are still connected to and contribute to the quality of larger downstream waters. Essentially, water that flows from ephemeral bodies eventually ends up in streams and rivers.
“Once you degrade these systems, you can’t just turn them around and snap your fingers and say, ‘OK, we’re going to restore them,’” Sullivan said. “Once we go down this path, it’s a very slippery, slippery slope.”
The Obama administration cited that report when expanding the definition of WOTUS protections to include ephemeral streams and wetlands. But land developers, the coal industry, and agriculture interests pushed back, arguing that vague language in the rule could put excessive regulation on businesses and farms.
Regulation Reservations
Kentucky soybean farmer Larry Thomas is one of those farmers against the Obama-era definition of WOTUS and in favor of the Trump administration’s revision.
Sporting a white beard, he stands among tall weeds on his farm near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to point over at a nearby creek bed.
“Talking about ephemeral streams, this stream, and I don’t know where it stops – somewhere on the other side of Bacon Creek Road – will not run year-round,” Thomas said.
Thomas said he was worried the Obama-era definition of WOTUS was too vague, and that federal regulators could extend the language to require regulation of things like water retention ponds on his farm.
“They want to grab another tributary and bring it into that,” Thomas said. “And we have to say somewhere, where does this stop? Otherwise we wind up in people’s yards.”
He believes the Trump administration revision of WOTUS provides more clarity for farmers on what water bodies are regulated.
Thomas mentioned specifically, under the revision, that it’s easier to determine whether wetlands are protected by having a surface water connection to other protected streams and rivers. Thomas also said regulation of ephemeral streams and wetlands should be left to the states.
But other area farmers believe such concerns are misplaced and that they, too, benefit from protected streams.
Laura DeYoung raises sheep in northwest Ohio, and is a member of the Ohio Farm Bureau and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association. She supports the Obama-era rule because of the expanded protections it provides for wetlands, and she points out that the 2015 rule explicitly exempted agriculture from any new regulation. She trusts the EPA in its exemption of agriculture.
“What happens upstream impacts what happens downstream,” DeYoung said. “I just think there are better battles to fight, and this isn’t a battle [farmers] need to fight.”
DeYoung said she hasn’t noticed a difference in how her farm has been regulated when the Obama-era rule went into effect in Ohio, the only state in the Ohio Valley where the rule is currently enacted. The Southern District Court of Ohio in March refused to issue an injunction to stop the implementation of the rule in the state.
Credit Liam Niemeyer / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Farmer Larry Thomas fears this retention pond could be regulated.
Legal Battles
The Obama-era rule is enacted in a total of 22 states, but ongoing litigation stopped its implementation in other states, including Kentucky and West Virginia.
West Virginia University Agriculture Law Professor Jesse Richardson believes even more litigation is likely if the Trump revision of WOTUS is finalized.
“I think as soon as the Trump administration finalizes their rule, which I anticipate that they will, I think there will be dozens of lawsuits filed the very next day,” Richardson said. “It’s just going to wind its way through the courts for five years, ten years – who knows?”
Richardson said that Congress could step in to define WOTUS and help end the court battles, but he didn’t think that was likely. A Senate hearing on WOTUS in June had senators expressing interest to redefine the Clean Water Act, but lawmakers offered no definitive steps forward.
An EPA spokesperson said the agency expects to take a final action on the Trump administration’s revised definition by December.
Glynis Board of ReSource partner station West Virginia Public Broadcasting contributed to this story.
A new crayfish species found in West Virginia was just named after an enthusiastic crayfish expert who lives in here in the state.
Published in the Journal of Natural History this month, Cambarus loughmani was named after Zachary Loughman. Loughman himself has discovered and named several crayfish in the region. He’s a biology professor at West Liberty University who has been known to convert students into biology majors by teaching about… you guessed it, crawdads.
One such student (who also was one of his first students), David Foltz, was the lead author in the research cohort that named Cambarus loughmani.
“It is fitting that this crayfish be named in his honor as both he and the crayfish are reclusive, hard to track down, and when faced with adversity, never back down and often advance with arms flailing,” Foltz read from the published explanation that linked Cambarus louphmani to Loughman.
The newly named bright blue crayfish is found in ridgetop seeps throughout the Teays River Valley of Cabell, Kanawha, Lincoln, Mason, and Putnam counties – an area where Loughman actually began studying crayfish as a graduate student at Marshall University in the early 2000s.
A federal lawsuit filed this week by an environmental group alleges two protected crayfish species are being harmed by coal mining in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia.
The suit, filed Wednesday in West Virginia by the Center for Biological Diversity, alleges that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has missed the one-year time frame set under the Endangered Species Act in which to designate habitat areas for the two crayfish species.
The Big Sandy crayfish and Guyandotte River crayfish were protected by the Endangered Species Act in 2016 because of habitat loss and water pollution.
The species are endemic to the Appalachian region. Crayfish are scavengers and play a key role in keeping streams healthy by eating decaying plants and animals. They are an important source of food for birds, fish and mammals.
The suit says the crayfish are “highly imperiled due to declining water quality and habitat loss from coal mining and urban development within their watersheds.”
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman declined to comment because the lawsuit is pending.
The Center for Biological Diversity wants a judge to compel the agency to designate habitat areas.
Zachary Loughman has built a career as a naturalist and a scientist by not letting his inner 10-year-old boy grow up.
He has discovered, identified, and named 10 new crayfish species here in North America, and as an Associate Professor of Biology at West Liberty University, he’s shared his fascination for the species with countless students.
“Everyone loves crayfish,” he said. “Anybody who grew up next to a creek knows what a crawdad is, so I basically have the dream job of every ten year old in West Virginia.”
Credit Glynis Board / WVPublic
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WVPublic
West Liberty student Audrey Sykes said Loughman is “easily one of the most passionate, enthusiastic and memorable professors that I’ve ever had.
“The way he feels about crayfish is inspiring.”
Loughman’s research has been featured in Science Magazine, National Geographic, and in the neuroscience publication Neuron, among others.
While he’s built a name for himself through crayfish research, Loughman said he was more of a snake guy growing up. He still loves them — he even has a bunch in his office. His fascination with crayfish, though, stemmed from a conversation with his adviser while Loughman was workinghis masters degree at Marshall University.
“I was driving home from my thesis site with Dr. Polly and he said, ‘I’ve been watching you, you really like natural history. You don’t have to study snakes for natural history, study something no one has put much effort into.’ Of course there were people who studied crayfish before me, but no one had looked at it from a naturalist perspective. Soon after that, I was focusing less and less on snakes and more on crawdads.”
Loughman said his career as a professor and biologist has stemmed from a lifelong curiosity with the natural world.
“Naturalists, as I like to identify as, we have a very different perspective of the natural world in that when we see animals, we immediately start asking questions,” he said. “When I see a snake or a crayfish, especially one I haven’t seen before, my first thought isn’t, ‘What is my hypothesis going to be?’ It’s: ‘Wow, this is cool!’ Then I immediately follow that up with, ‘What are you?’”
Credit Guenter Schuster
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The Big Sandy Crayfish is found in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. It’s listed as a threatened species and protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Loughman takes students all over the region, from the Northern Panhandle where he found red crayfish with bright blue features, to the southern coalfields, where he discovered a new kind of crayfish.
He’s even had some fun naming them.
“I described a crayfish thats endemic to the Tug River which is shared between Kentucky and West Virginia and gave it the name Cambarus Hatfieldi after the Hatfields of infamy.”
The Faculty Merit Foundation of West Virginia named Loughman the state’s Professor of the Year in 2014. He’s been teaching graduate and undergraduate students for eleven years at West Liberty, and he said he loves education almost more than he loves looking for crawdads in streams.
“Whenever I get outside and I’m teaching, or I get to do the field work, or I’m bouncing down the road in a van full of college kids that it’s my job to teach and turn into the next generation of conservation biologists.
