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Highlights of the 2003 survey.
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Cullyamurra Waterhole on the Cooper was still 30 metres deep despite the severity of the drought. |
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Team member, Janet Pritchard, …“seeing Coongie Lakes virtually dry – the contrast of boating everywhere on the 2000 flood with being able to drive across dry lake beds filled with waist-high swaying grasses. Realising that of the thousands of fish we sampled on previous trips, some had retreated and concentrated upstream, but most had likely perished brought home the real boom/bust nature of things.”
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Small waterholes still with water in them were often teeming with fish, pointing to their importance in maintaining fish populations in Lake Eyre Basin rivers over the long term.
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Getting up close and personal with ten million flies and mosquitoes.
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Traditional owner, Joslin Eatts, sharing dreamtime stories, as well as Indigenous values and heritage of the various survey sites on the Diamantina. |
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Waterholes in the Peake Creek that were ten times saltier that seawater and only had algae living in them, were teeming with shrimps and water beetle larvae just a few days later after the floods!
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The first ever scientific record of Hyrtl’s catfish in the Neales River. |
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ARIDFLO ON THE GO!
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The ARIDFLO project, due to finish early this year, has gained additional NHT funds to conduct more research during drought conditions.
Led by South Australia’s Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation, and supported by Queensland’s Environment Protection Agency, Parks and Wildlife Service, and Natural Resources and Mines, ARIDFLO has been investigating the hydrology-ecology relationships in the South Australian and Queensland rivers of the Lake Eyre Basin since 2000.
Traditional owner, Joclin Eatts in silent contemplation at Hunters Gorge on the Diamantina River.
The impetus for this additional funding came not from the scientists or agencies, but from members of the Lake Eyre Basin community and arose from the October 2002 Lake Eyre Basin Ministerial Forum conference in Birdsville. At the conference, the ARIDFLO team conducted a community workshop to discuss the project’s results. Many people pointed out that the project had, by sheer good luck, been able to sample almost the full range of flow conditions likely to occur in the Lake Eyre Basin, apart from severe drought.
The Cooper Creek and Georgina Diamantina catchment committees along with the Arid Areas Catchment Water Management Board enthusiastically supported an extension to the project with the result that Environment Australia has funded the project to sample the drought conditions, and continue until mid 2003. The level of support from all sectors is gratefully acknowledged by the ARIDFLO team.
So far, 2003 has proved to be as remarkable as 2000 when the project started, although very different. The South Australian field survey ran from late January until late February. It started at a dry and dusty 50-degrees, and ended with being trapped for a week by Neales River floodwaters!
Much of the South Australian trip was spent on the Diamantina and Cooper systems. Many sites sampled on earlier trips were now dry, however, the team managed to survey a number of the regular sites plus some other larger waterholes not sampled before in this project. The information from all these sites will be invaluable in helping understand how the animals of these rivers cope with drought.
Very welcome and fairly widespread rains in the last week of the South Australian survey meant that some waterholes could be sampled twice in the space of a few days – first when the waterholes were almost dry, and then when the river was spilling out over the floodplain. Opportunities like that are very rare and the team found amazing changes.
The Queensland survey occupied most of March and surveyed a mix of Thomson and Diamantina floodplain and main channel sites, some of which had only just started to receive inflow from recent rains. It was a rare opportunity to gauge the ecological response immediately following a severe drought. Many of the sites sampled in Queensland had received flow from upstream, while some only had local runoff. This gave a good comparison to the last survey in March/April 2002 when most of the semi-permanent holes were dry.
The evidence of breeding was clear but much lower than in 2000; there were many more juveniles than adults this time. This indicates that the system will take time to recover and the strength of that recovery will depend on subsequent seasonal conditions.
A really valuable part of the Queensland survey was having traditional owner, Joslin Eatts along to provide an Indigenous perspective. The team members learnt something of Indigenous values, stories and management while Joslin gained a better understanding of the reasons for the survey and the science behind it.
The project has now been lucky enough to sample during huge floods, drought and many smaller, in-between flows. The information from these surveys will help us understand how the plants and animals of the Lake Eyre Basin rivers survive during droughts and then respond to floods.