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Stream Ecosystem

stream ecosystem
BIg Darby Creek in Autumn
© Harold Malde

Most streams throughout Ohio and their fish fauna have been greatly modified since settlement times. These modifications include the removal of trees and brush along stream banks, ditching and draining of marshes, increased erosion of land and sedimentation and impacts caused by pollutants.

These drastic modifications have considerably modified the general composition of Ohio’s fish fauna, changing it from a species complex dominated by fishes requiring clear or vegetated water to one dominated by those species tolerant of turbid water and of bottoms composed of clayey silts.

The relative absence of these types of modifications is what makes the Big Darby Creek system so special. The myriad fish species, which call the Darby Creeks home, require clear waters with aquatic vegetation, clean bottoms of sand, gravel, boulders, and bedrock. While aquatic environmental conditions in the Darby have deteriorated in this regard over the years, the Darby remains an island of aquatic biodiversity in a sea of severely impacted Ohio and Midwestern streams. In many ways, the Darby is a window back into the time before European settlement.

Return to Darby Ecosystems