When Langley resident Jennifer Rumley graduated with a Trinity Western University Environmental Studies degree in 2014, she was hoping to get a paying job. Instead, this past fall she paid to get some experience with A Rocha Canada.
“The internship with A Rocha was the next best thing to a paid position,” said Jennifer. “I got to do some meaningful work in my field, and have some exciting adventures working with endangered species and their habitat.”
Rumley sought the elusive Salish sucker along the length of the Little Campbell River which begins in Aldergrove and runs to the ocean in White Rock.
“I loved collecting traps, having the mystery of what lives under the water revealed,” she said. “What was most exciting was pulling up a sucker”
True to the name, Salish suckers have sucker-like mouths. Salish suckers can grow up to about a foot long but most are much smaller.
There are just a few watersheds in the Fraser Valley and the Puget Sound area of Washington State where they still occur, but are severely reduced in number by human activities.
The Salish sucker was thought to be extinct in the Little Campbell watershed until another A Rocha intern, Audrey Epp, found one in a pond at the A Rocha Centre in South Surrey in 2011.
It had not been seen in the watershed for 35 years.
In her book Planted, Leah Kostamo wrote that as Epp awoke that day, “she had felt like God was saying to her, ‘I have a surprise for you today.’” As the intern went to check the trap in the pond — for the last time that season — there was the surprise.
Ever since that first surprise, A Rocha workers have been searching the watershed diligently, putting out 166 traps in 2014. Jennifer was able to trap just four of the elusive Salish suckers.
The traps also yielded many other valuable native fish and amphibians, as well as many non-native fish, some of which may prey on the endangered suckers.
Invasive fish were not the only threats that Jennifer’s work exposed. She found dissolved oxygen levels were alarmingly low in some places. Future work will involve trying to understand how land use practices or stream-side conditions might contribute to these habitat issues.
Jennifer knows this unpaid work will pay off.
“Being part of the A Rocha Canada community for a season was really rewarding and gave me a real sense of what working in the conservation field is like.”
David Clements is a professor of biology and environmental studies at Trinity Western University.