anthropogenic impairments of water bodies

write a response to this students short essay. What can you ad to the topic? Use at least one source.

The article that I found talks about the anthropogenic impairments of water bodies and how it has an impact on fish. This is the negative impact that humans have on water and the effects that those impacts have on the fish. The article attempts to find a relationship between the water quality and the performance of the fish living in those waters. As stated in the article, There are over 44 thousand bodies of water in the United States that are considered to be impaired which means that it carries more than a maximum daily load. One of the main points that the article focuses that until today, science has had a hard time connecting fish performance with the quality of a body of water. The article goes on to explain that it was even fairly unknown what specific effects bad water quality had on fish populations.

The experiment that is done in the article is a study to show the effects of water quality on a specific fish. The study split the cutler dam reservoir into five segments in order to capture fish from a range of different water quality environments. The water quality including temperature and BOD was taken of each area for the record. Within the study, they were able to capture three species of fish. The way that the study was complete, the researchers were able to simulate potential water quality constraints and the effects that it would have on each fish species. The researchers noticed a growth pattern difference as well as behavioral differences. Although the document does state that this sole study does not show enough information to show that the quality of water is indeed affecting the potential for fish, I would say that it leads to some major concerns.

One of the major concerns in this area was the temperature deviations. It was stated in the article that slight temperature deviations above or below the physiological thermal optima of a species can cause increased metabolic demands and stress on a species. It is also understood that a species such as a fish do determine where they go in the body of water. Typically the deeper you go the colder it gets. This can be the case for some fish in certain bodies of water but for some species in small ponds, they do not have an option of where to migrate to. They have nowhere to go it water temperatures change abruptly.

In this situation, seeing as it is a reservoir atop a dam, the temperature problem can likely be solved by allowing water to flow out of the reservoir creating the demand for more water into the reservoir from the tributary it comes from. I would assume this would make the stream flow a little faster cooling down the water. The article did not go into this so I may be completely wrong.

Budy, P., Baker, M., & Dahle, S. (2011). Predicting Fish Growth Potential and Identifying Water Quality Constraints: A Spatially-Explicit Bioenergetics Approach. Environmental Management, 48(4), 691-709. doi:10.1007/s00267-011-9717-1