On clear, dark nights the Kansas City skyline bounces off the Missouri River. On the surface, the Big Muddy is boring. It's not wide like the Mississippi and it's not wild like the Yukon. Underwater is a different story. Ancient giants swim here.

Smiling or not depends on your persepective I guess. Photo courtsey of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service

The first time I saw a paddlefish in person I thought the fish was smiling at me. It wasn't happy to see me in reality. It was happily gorging on plankton just like every other paddlefish for the last 165 million years. In proper biological terms, paddlefish are filter feeders. That means they swim forward forcing water over its gills. They breath through their gills and collect food via gill rakers.

These fish can grow over seven feet long and weigh about 200 pounds. The fish look like grey ships floating through the water column. For us humans, they are like a pleasant sail ship. For microorganisms, paddlefish are like aircraft carriers armed to the teeth. From above, their rostrum, the "paddle" part of paddlefish you can see in front of their faces, even looks like a runway. The rostrum helps them navigate the dark water and find food. It has millions of tiny sensors called ampullae of Lorenzini that detect electric signals from the plankton. Shovelnose Catfish as they're sometimes called swing the rostrum around like a radar in search of the next meal.

Paddlefish swim up and down the Missouri drawing attention like carriers on the open ocean. The river was always big and slow-flowing. It was notorious with sailors in the 19th century for being different every single day. It was as inconsistently consistent as the weather in Kansas City. That river was perfect for paddlefish. The silty water was loaded with food. Paddlefish had all the tasty plankton (the freshwater kind not the krabbie patty stealing kind).

A paddlefish lurking in the dark. Photo courtsey of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service

The Mighty Mo has significantly changed over the millennia but paddlefish don't care. They can be neighbors with us and the Sinclaires. Spoonbills are witnesses to every stage of the Missouri River's eras. From its humble origins carrying water from the baby Rocky Mountains to the ocean to the 21st-century these fish have seen it all. They dodged other fish, people, and the occasional bison to be here today. A paddlefish won't even blink at a soccer ball falling from the sky.

Paddlefish Restoration

Over the last two centuries, Americans have re-scaped wild rivers across the country. We’ve built dams and other structures that are symbolic of our quest to control nature.

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In today’s video, we’ll explore how dams and levees changed the Missouri river and in the process harmed one of America’s most unique fish, the paddlefish.

The earliest fossil records for these fish date to the Cretaceous period around 125 million years ago. They have literally been swimming around since the dinosaurs.

Paddlefish look really big and scary but they are harmless to people. They can weigh as much as 150 pounds, but despite what their size may suggest, they are peaceful fish who eat microorganisms like plankton.

That is where their characteristic rostrum or bill comes into play. It has a series of small ampullae that help them sense their prey much like ampullae of Lorenzini do in sharks.

In order to spawn, spoonbills travel up smaller rivers when the conditions are right. Spawning is triggered by the warmer, faster flowing water in late spring. They need gravel beds or similar hard substrates to spawn on.

Scientists have shown that these fish tend to exhibit site fidelity which means they like to return to the same spawning grounds year after year.

Prior to the dam-building craze, they were abundant across the country and served as an important source of food for many people.

In the 19th-century, dams were an obstacle to paddlefish but they didn’t threaten the species’ existence. That all changed when larger dams we're built in the early 20th-century. Today, we’ll focus on the Federal dams along the Missouri River.

The Missouri River basin covers about 500 thousand square miles and eight states from Missouri to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. It also includes North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas.

In 1933, President Roosevelt approved the construction of Fort Peck Dam in Northeast Montana. In time, it would be the first of six major federal dams on the river.

Over the next 30 years five more were built and by 1963 Big Bend Dam in South Dakota was closed. All are still active today.

The dams store water for flood control, drinking, and irrigation but the government didn’t stop there. Human influence on the Missouri River continued to grow as other structures were built.

In the southern reaches of the Missouri the main flood control infrastructure are levees. They serve two main purposes. The levees protect property along the river and they help narrow the river channel for barges.

The river that we see today is tamed to some extent by these structures. They have made life along its banks easier for humans but they have also severely damaged the river’s ecosystem.

Stock footage is curtesy of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, The National Archives, and Videvo