Baugo Creek and the Tributary Survey, 1979

Collections of 1979; Marenchin & Sever, Saint Mary's College

The mainstem had its survey in 1972; the creeks got theirs seven years later, from the county's own college biologists. The scientific baseline for the drainage was Shelby Gerking's 1945 distribution study — sixty-eight species of fish from thirty-eight localities in the St. Joseph River drainage, fifty-three of them in St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties. In the spring and fall of 1979, Ginger Lee Marenchin and David M. Sever of the Department of Biology at Saint Mary's College seined and electrofished seven tributary streams across the two counties — 3,741 specimens, forty-one species plus hybrid shiners — to measure what thirty years of dams, ladders, and pollution control had done to the drainage's small water. Mishawaka's own creek is Baugo Creek, which rises in Elkhart County and enters the river at this city's eastern edge; the survey's Baugo locality stood just across the county line (T37N, R4E), and it was, per unit of effort, the richest small water in the study: 802 specimens of nineteen species in only two collections, against 118 specimens and nine species in Solomon Creek and ninety-eight and twelve in Pine Creek. Its shiner complex ran 274 common shiners, thirty-two striped shiners, and twenty-nine of their hybrids. Two of the tributary survey's single-stream species belonged to the Baugo alone among the seven localities: a single carp, and the silverjaw minnow — thirty-eight specimens, a small creek fish whose whole two-county record in this survey is Baugo Creek. The survey's novelties were drainage-level: the brook lamprey and the fathead minnow were new records for the entire St. Joseph River drainage, and the mottled sculpin was a new record for both counties, taken in Juday Creek — the small stream of the county's north side, which the survey found the poorest of its seven waters at fifty specimens and seven species. The creek record is printed at this size because it is the only scientific fish record that touches Mishawaka's ground at stream scale: the river's smallest documented fauna, counted in the creek that still runs down to the impoundment's east end.

Principal sources

1. Ginger Lee Marenchin and David M. Sever, "Survey of the Fishes of the St. Joseph River Drainage in St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties, Indiana," Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, pp. 454–458 (collections of 1979) — read whole.
2. Gerking (1945), the drainage's fish distribution, as cited and used as the baseline in Marenchin & Sever.