A support group and a lab in the St. Louis area provide resources for people with the allergy to mammal products — and evidence that its effects can be reversed.
The Hernando DeSoto Bridge stretches over the Mississippi River in Memphis. A first-of-its-kind ecosystem restoration project seeks to rehabilitate habitats for native species along a 39-mile stretch of the Lower Mississippi River from the Wolf River to the Hatchie River. Karen Pulfer Focht for the Tennessee Lookout.
We've got a vocab word this week, "batture," land beaten by the river, or what remains of the river's active floodplain.
This comes from new reporting by Cassandra Stephenson of the Tennessee Lookout and Lucas Dufalla of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Their collaborative piece on a plan to restore 39 miles of forest and wetlands along the Mississippi River near Memphis was published last week. It's a complicated story, as reporting on federal projects often is. They dug into the nuts and bolts of the legislation and do a great job illustrating the real-world impacts and hurdles ahead.
Lucas Dufalla, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
We asked for a bit about their work on the project. For Dufalla, it was a lesson in scale. He shares:
"Reporting this story was full of firsts. It was the first time I learned that there is a word for the land between the levee and the river during low water (it’s batture, by the way). It’s also the first time that I have come face-to-face with the length of Army Corps of Engineers projects.
Revitalization efforts on this section of the river have been in the works for 25 years. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. Learning about the work that goes into a project like this—whether it’s the anticipated negotiations with landowners or conservation strategies—is not only intriguing, but speaks to the scale of the project itself. No wonder it’s taken more than two decades (and might take another decade to get funded).
The potential addition of boat ramps along the river, I think, will be especially intriguing for Arkansans.
The Natural State has a small-but-mighty fishing industry, and those anglers are always looking for more places to get onto the river. Moving forward, I’ll be keeping a lookout for funding approval. We'll see if it takes a decade, as one Arkansas Game & Fish conservation assistant chief said it might."
Cassandra Stephenson, Tennessee Lookout
Stephenson adds:
"I always enjoy learning about the creatures that call the Mississippi River home, and this story had several with quirks to love.
For me, the alligator gar, pallid sturgeon and fat pocketbook mussel became the main characters of the 165-page environmental report that undergirds this extensive ecosystem restoration project proposal. Mussels help filter and clean river water while they feed. Pallid sturgeon and alligator gar grow to be massive beasts that look like they’d fit right in with dinosaurs, but they first need calmer wetland habitats to spawn and reach their full potential.
For the alligator gar, that means growing up to 8 feet long and weighing more than 300 pounds. With those stats, they are one of few native predators with enough heft to hunt invasive carp, a fast-growing fish that is outcompeting native species and altering the food web.
A gar, a fish native to the Mississippi River, swims in an aquarium at the Tunica Riverpark and Museum in Tunica, Mississippi, on Feb, 7, 2025. Karen Pulfer Focht for TN Lookout
If it gets funded, this project intends to restore and protect some of the wetland habitat to support these native species, but that last hurdle is a big one. This story also allowed me to glimpse the complexity of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ civil works budget and the presidential administration’s role in shaping its priorities. This project proposal came together over 20 years of research, and I’m grateful to be able to report on it now, where the rubber meets the road, so to speak."
Many thanks to Cassandra and Lucas for their excellent reporting! I grew up on the Mississippi, and imagining an 8-foot alligator gar emerging from the murk has me rethinking some water skiing trips. May we all appreciate these modern day dinosaurs, and the habitat the rely on.
We've also got a bit of housekeeping to wrap up. In our feature last week on reporter Jess Savage and the importance of sphagnum moss to bog ecosystems, we incorrectly identified a source in the final photo. Volo Bog educator Amy Runkle was on the left, not the right. We regret the error. (Part of our commitment at the Desk is to fact-check our work and be transparent when we make mistakes. Now you get to see a bit of how the sausage is made.)
Thanks for reading. More next week from across the Basin!
Sincerely,
Michael Crowe Interim Assistant Director, Ag & Water Desk
