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Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Katey Zimmerman assisted North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission staff with a remarkable task: releasing Carolina madtoms into their native environment.

“Oh, my gosh, it was so magical and fun,” Katey said. “And they released a lot more than I was expecting.”

At the invitation of fisheries biologist Michael Fisk, Katey met up the group on Wednesday to set free nearly 300 of the tiny, federally endangered catfish into a Tar River tributary. The fish, grown in an aquaculture setting at Conservation Fisheries in Knoxville, Tennessee, are native to the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico watersheds.

“They had a long journey yesterday,” Katey said.

Katey first became familiar with the endangered madtom (Noturus furiosus) when she joined a WRC venture to survey the numbers of madtoms in the upper Tar region.

“There are some that exist in the wild, but they also release them,” she said. “These are tagged, with different colors for different years, to easily track where they came from.”

The Carolina madtom received federal protection as an endangered species in 2021, according the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website. Their greatest threat is degraded water quality — they need clean, flowing water to survive. The remaining populations are small, isolated, with a contracted range that makes them vulnerable to catastrophic and natural events.

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