Four years after a massive flood, biologists are collecting samples from the river in hopes of figuring out how long it will take the population of fish, bugs and plants to recover.
PUBLISHED 3:25 PM CDT May. 13, 2022, Archis Grubh is still checking up on the Llano River. He’s an aquatic biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and is tasked with collecting and analyzing samples of macroinvertebrates from the Llano River. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call the macroinvertebrates “bugs.”
“They form an important link in the food chain for the bass, like Guadalupe bass, for instance, which is our state fish,” said Grubh. “We used to call them bugs but now we report what we do, and they won’t accept ‘bugs’ anymore, so we have to call them ‘macroinvertebrates,’” McBride said with a laugh. “This science stuff, you know?”