Reintroduction biologist Meredith Harris works to save endangered species.
Photo Above: Reintroduction biologist Meredith Harris
© Courtesy Tennessee Aquarium.
It’s not easy for a chatty young scientist with an “out there” personality to hole up alone in a spacious facility that is usually bustling with human interaction. But that is exactly what Meredith Harris, reintroduction biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute in Chattanooga, is doing on the day we talked to her, during the coronavirus shutdown. The lone staff member in the building, the 30-year-old Harris is keeping an eye on the native fish species that live in the tanks.
“I’m feeding them. I am making sure that their life support is still functioning every day, monitoring them,” she says. “But we’re also in the middle of spawning season for a couple of our species.”
Harris grew up on a dairy farm near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, showing cows at state and county fairs and voraciously reading books about wildlife.
“I loved running around the woods there, trying to spot wild animals, or trying to catch fish or minnows or frogs in the ponds and the river,” she says.
Despite her passion for critters, she thought she’d become a writer or a piano teacher. “Science itself never really appealed to me when I was a child,” she says.
What did appeal to her was preserving the natural world. At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she set out to earn a degree in environmental studies with a focus on policy, but soon felt burned out on the lobbying aspect. One day, a friend who was majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology shared her textbook—which to Harris looked more like a field guide—and information about her lab classes, which required a lot of time outdoors.
“And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that is the major that I need to be in,’” Harris says. “I realized I just really needed to do more direct, hands-on conservation work with endangered animals.”
But it wasn’t until her last semester of college, when she and her classmates went on an electro-fishing expedition to sample the variety and abundance of fish in a local stream, that she realized what kinds of critters she wanted to work with.
“I knew that we had things like catfish, like brim or bass,” she says. “But that was the first time that I was aware of just the sheer amount of fish biodiversity that we have in our backyard in East Tennessee. I found out that we are the state that has the most species of freshwater fishes in the country, and the region that has just about the most anywhere in the entire world. That was kind of a lightbulb moment for me.”
Upon graduation in 2013, Harris joined the staff of Conservation Fisheries Inc., in Knoxville, where she propagated, cared for and assisted in the release and monitoring of rare and endangered native freshwater species while earning her master’s in fisheries science at UT. In the fall of 2017, she heard about the job opening at TNACI.
“I’ve always loved the [Tennessee] Aquarium, ever since I was a kid and taking field trips here,” she says. “So it really seemed like a dream job.”
In her job as reintroduction biologist, Harris raises imperiled fish and places them in their native habitats in an effort to bring back dwindling populations. For two years, for example, she bred laurel dace, an eye-catching species with shiny gold side stripes and lips that turn red during mating season. One of the most critically endangered freshwater fishes in the world—tomato farming causes sediment to wash into their streams, suffocating their eggs—it is only found on Signal and Lookout mountains near Chattanooga.
“Being able to work with such a really beautiful and rare fish was a great experience,” she says. “And they readily reproduce in captivity, which was really awesome to be able to do.”
Even so, the fish are not ready to live in the wild. “One of the biggest pillars of reintroduction biology,” says Harris, “is that if the issue that made a species go extinct in that place to begin with is still a problem, you can’t really reintroduce them and succeed. You have to address the problem before you can do any stocking.”
TNACI scientists are currently negotiating with area landowners and farmers to find best practice solutions that benefit everyone, including the fish.
One happy-ending story involves the annual release of young Southern Appalachian brook trout in protected sites in the Cherokee National Forest in northeastern Tennessee. (Trout Unlimited, a private conservation group, is funding the project through license plate sales.)
“It’s always a good day when you’re releasing fish,” Harris says, “because you worked really hard over many, many months and you see all of that come to fruition when they swim away into the river and fulfill the ecological role that they were always meant to.”
As of early April, the coronavirus scare hadn’t slowed Harris’ efforts. Longhead darters, a small species that has disappeared statewide, are actively spawning at TNACI; common logperch are being propagated to serve as hosts for endangered mussels; and plans are underway for lake sturgeon releases in Watts Bar Reservoir outside Knoxville this fall.
“This kind of work—it doesn’t wait,” she says. “It’s very important to us and to the world.”
A UT football fanatic, Harris also enjoys the animals outside her area of expertise. “Don’t tell any other fish people,” she whispers. “But I am a big bird watcher in my spare time.”
The most challenging part of her job, she says, isn’t the painstaking process of restoring indigenous fish to the region’s waterways, but the human barriers she encounters along the way.
“We’re trying to mitigate the harm that has already been done to our fresh water and to the animals that depend on it for survival, things like pollution, development and climate change. Sometimes you feel like every time you plug up one hole, to use the sinking boat analogy, more leaks spring up everywhere else.
“On the flip side,” she adds, “when we do have a successful reintroduction and know that all that hard work isn’t for nothing, it’s really amazing. The sturgeon program brings me so much joy because we put a lot of labor and a lot of love into raising those fish every year, and then we go out to sample them in the winter and we catch them frequently and we can see that they’re surviving and they’re growing and they’re moving around through the system like they should be.”
The story above appears in our July/August 2020 issue.
