[soft piano music] [Nick] I've always loved the water.

I've been scuba diving since I was 12, all over Texas.

I've been to every lake in Texas and San Marcos River is by far the best place in Texas I have scuba dived.

It's a beautiful, magical area.

It's home to a lot of beautiful creatures.

You get this ancient feeling with the mist, with the fog, with, with the birds, you really are drawn to it and you can see why people have inhabited this area for so long.

It attracts all sorts of life.

And I couldn't imagine it going bad.

[soft piano music] My name is Nick Breaux.

I'm a contract worker at the Meadow Center.

The San Marcos River is located in San Marcos 30 miles south of Austin.

It flows from the Hayes County to the Guadalupe city area.

It is 72 degrees year round.

Underground, the water is warmed and then bubbles up through the Springs.

It is fed by the Edwards Aquifer which also feeds the Comal River.

The Edwards Aquifer is a huge basin of water.

It's all underground.

It feeds over two million people of drinking water.

- San Marcos was the fastest growing town and it has been one of the fastest growing counties in the nation in recent years.

- The time is now to really think about how we're going to be using the Edwards Aquifer over the next 10, 20 or 50 years.

Anybody that has experience in those bodies of water just internally understands their importance and their value.

But I think a lot of people don't understand how sensitive those resources are.

- Recent years the San Marcos River Foundation has been acquiring land or helping the city acquire land to make a band of land above Spring Lake, up on the recharge zone recharge.

Recharge zone is being protected by these lands.

And that means that caves and features that collect rainfall will have vegetation around them instead of pavement.

So the water will be cleaner that goes into the Aquifer and comes out of our springs.

There's a very thin layer of soil and vegetation over all this rock that has formed over millions of years and if you disturb that vegetation and bulldoze and crack up the rock, to trench in wastewater lines or water lines or pipelines or roads or subdivisions, you're breaking up the rock, you're eliminating the soil and the vegetation.

If you've disturbed all of this vegetation and this ecosystem that is set up to filter the water well, then you're ending up with a lot of silt in the water.

That can then silt up your cracks and fractures and holes that hold water in the Aquifer.

There's a lot of different things that can happen when you change the surface of the ground.

[Ben] There is a lot of pumping that occurs in the Edwards Aquifer.

We see Aquifer levels fluctuate.

They respond to precipitation and they respond to pumping.

On a longer scale, if extraction of water exceeds recharge, then Aquifer levels are going to continue to decline.

We think about how much flow is needed to keep that ecosystem functioning.

What we don't want to see is the San Marcos River flows reduced so much that that impacts temperature and dissolved oxygen.

The plant communities that are there.

The animals that use that river as habitat.

Just because there's some water there doesn't mean that it's a functioning ecosystem.

There are certain thresholds that we don't want to pass in terms of sufficient water quality and water quantity.

And researchers have been doing a lot to try to understand what does sufficient quantity look like?

What does sufficient water quality look like to maintain that ecosystem?

- The San Marcos river has been co-existing with humans for about 13,000 years.

We still find artifacts from the Clovis People such as Spearheads or Arrowheads.

Back in the day, around the 1800s, this place used to be a mill.

You had Missionaries that would come here and you still see ruins of that to this day like the old church hill.

Spring Lake is surrounded by history and you still see it to this day.

And then you saw it change over from that to Aquarena Amusement Park.

[Dianne] When I was a child, we're talking the 1950s, that was a different era.

Aquarena was, it was a real small town you know, swimming pig, underwater mermaid show, amusement park rides, little gondolas and that sort of thing.

It was just, it was fun.

I enjoyed it when I was a kid and a lot of kids did.

But I think that nowadays The Meadows Center is so much more interesting.

- A lot of people came here and I think the amusement park actually opened up a lot of people's eyes.

And then the university bought it in 1994.

And that, right when they bought it you see an instant change from Amusement to Education.

[Dr Rose] And that then opened up a whole new area of aquatic turtle research.

And biology department was one of the leaders in figuring out what what was really gonna happen with this property?

And we saw that they were a lot of turtles around.

So we thought these would be excellent models for students to work on various projects related to everything from reproduction to growth, so forth.

Is primarily for turtles, total marked turtle's nest, it's about 6,340 something.

The total number of captures is 14,069.

That's the initial captures plus recaptures.

So we have a massive data set on growth of numbers of animals.

[Ben] As an ecosystem, the Edwards Aquifer is one of the most interesting groundwater habitats on the planet.

And that's not hyperbole.

I say that for a couple of reasons.

One is, it's extremely bio-diverse.

So we have a single groundwater site here on campus, the San Marcos Artesian Well, that we've been sampling for over 120 years.

We're still finding new species there.

Currently, that site ranks about number four on the planet in terms of number of groundwater obligate species.

So when I say a groundwater obligate species, these are the kinds of animals that you can imagine living in caves.

They have no pigment.

You can almost see through them, they're blind.

They have really long antenna and elongated appendages to help them find their way around.

So the Edwards Aquifer supports species that live in the Aquifer itself.

And it also supports species that live in the springs like Comal Springs, San Marcos Springs, right?

And so these are species that live nowhere else on the planet.

A lot of these things are only known from one or two or three sites and that's it on the planet.

Alright.

And because of that rarity, and because of all of the pressure that we put on that Aquifer using it for agricultural purposes, using it for for municipal purposes, the threat of contamination, because of all those threats, we have a number of those rare species are actually listed as as federally endangered.

- We have bird quarters that come all the way from, you know Alaska and the Arctic and fly down this way and nest or spend their summers anyway, feeding and watering in the bays and estuaries of Texas.

Even the whooping cranes, an internationally known iconic endangered species, depends on these spring flows that reach the bays and estuaries.

[Nick] The work that we do is biology field work.

We will remove invasive species of plants, such as hydrilla.

That plant, if not contained, it will outgrow or out-compete all the native species.

We go in and we remove it as best we can.

And we replant the native species that it killed.

The plants that are specific to the San Marcos River are Texas Wild Rice, Cabomba, Potamogeton, Sagittarius, and Ludwigia.

So the Texas Wild Rice is endemic to the San Marcos River.

Meaning it only grows in the San Marcos River.

You can not find Texas Wild Rice anywhere else in the world.

And native species like turtles or salamanders, they rely on those plants specifically for cover, for food, for nutrients.

So if the hydrilla were to out-compete those plants, those native species would not survive.

And if we were to lose, let's say we were to lose the Texas salamander, then that takes away from the food chain.

So now the bass don't have as much to eat, so maybe you lose a lot of the bass or the sunfish don't have much to eat, so now you lose a lot as a sunfish.

Now the whole food chain starts to break down.

So I know a little salamander might not sound important but it could drastically change everything.

- So another of our endemic species that's federally protected is the Fountain Darter.

So Darters are really cool fish because they're lack a swim bladder.

So unlike, you know, some of the minnows that you'll see swimming around in the water colony, the Fountain Darters are kind of hopping around on the bottom.

So if the San Marcos Springs stop flowing, or that flow is reduced and the environmental parameters in the spring run changes in the headwaters of the San Marcos River, then, you know, the chances are those, those Fountain Darters are not going to be able to deal with that very well.

Because that spring flow, provides a level of environmental stability.

So the headwaters or the San Marcos River really acts as a refuge for these species that are not able to really live in other places.

- I'm Nick Menchaka, president of Atlas Environmental.

I do underwater litter removal and invasive fish removal.

The Armored catfish, they were released through aquarium trade from possibly students or possibly anybody in town who has a fish.

And they, you know, has a fish for so long and it outgrows their tank and they don't know what to do with it, but they don't want to kill it so they go and release it into the river because they want it to survive.

And these fish become an ecological threat and they thrive in our river.

[Nick] The city actually opened up a little pool for people to go dump their fish tanks in.

They say, "Hey, you know, if you want to dump your fish tank, come dump it here, come dump it in a in a place that it's supposed to go, that it won't explode into the other populations and affect other native species."

[Nick M] The tilapia, they were released for invasive vegetation control for hydrilla.

I've also heard they were released for use in the movie "Piranha" in the eighties I believe.

The best way to remove these fish and the least disturbing way on our native environment is through spear fishing.

There's a zero I mean practically zero bycatch as long as you know, who's spear fishing.

Identifies the fish correctly and we're, you know we're really strict and stern on that.

The idea with the fish fry is to, to honor our catch, to respect our catch, not let any of it go to waste.

And, you know, share it with our community.

We started these fish fries and we would just save all the tilapia.

And if there was certain amount catfish that were big enough, we would save those as well.

That's a really cool way for us to respect the fish and honor our catch, by sharing it with our community.

[dramatic music] [Nick] With a lot of people, you're going to have a lot of foot traffic.

You're going to have a lot of litter.

It's just the way it is, whether you mean to or not.

- The litter contracts I have, they're based around our peak season in the river, which is, you know, May through September.

And that's when we're seeing the most traffic out there.

And that's where we're seeing the most people flipping over at Rio Vista falls or accidentally losing a can in the river.

But also, we're also seeing a big influx a big core of, of trash, and especially microliter coming into the river from our tributaries.

- People don't know the impact that they're leaving behind.

They rip up plants on accident when they're tubing.

They leave litter behind.

You see a lot of people come in, leave beer cans, clothing articles like socks, deflated tubes along the river just left behind.

- My girlfriend, Janaye, she was a sculpturing minor at Texas State so she learned to weld.

She learned to do all sorts of different stuff with the sculpting.

So we just have been saving and kind of categorizing and organizing different trash to make these sculptures.

So, you know, we're talking hats, bills of hats, shoes, flip-flops, the goggles, snorkels, all that stuff.

It's so easy to piece it together to make something that's so significant and that creates so much awareness, you know, within our community, they light up at night.

We put in lights.

It just looks actually really cool.

[dramatic music] [Dianne] As this area gets just crushed with more and more humanity, there may have to be more river parks opened.

And limits placed on how many people can be a one spot at one time just to keep from harming the resource, you know pounding the ground into dust.

And removing all the vegetation with the foot traffic.

There's many things like that that you have to control.

[Dr Rose] There was one turtle that was injured by a fishermen.

And what he had done is he tossed the lure out there and it snagged in the turtle's face and in its arms.

And so his lure was so important that he jerked it out.

He jerked her face off and skin, everything off her arms so forth so on.

And he just left her there to bleed to death.

So they called me, she stayed there probably two days by herself.

I mean, just on land dying.

It, it takes them a long time to die.

[Nick] Just because more people live here doesn't mean that we can't co-exist with the river.

[Dianne] The river is a symbol of the Edwards Aquifer which is under our feet and we can't see it but it serves millions of people with drinking water.

And I'm talking about drinking water that they can pump out of their well and drink.

They don't have to run it through a treatment plant because it's clean.

And if we allow our water source to be harmed or depleted or polluted, then we are really seriously holding back the economic future of this area.

[Ben] I think it's a really tricky question to think about, "What is the best way to get everyone on board with moving towards sustainability?"

That's a big challenge because we have to balance human needs and the realities of population growth with natural resource management and that, across the world, that's, that's not a challenge that's unique to this area.

But what we do know is that when people have a personal connection with a resource, they're more likely to think about the resource and maintaining that resource when it comes time to decision making.

[Dianne] We have river cleanups several times a year, and sometimes groups come to us and wanna do their own cleanup.

We clean up trash that flows into our property constantly from Willow Creek.

Because the Willow Creek flows through the whole city and all the litter on streets washes in.

[Nick M] It is absolutely crucial to get young people invested in natural resources.

And that's why I love the program that I work in.

If anybody goes out and snorkels in the San Marcos River or they take a boat ride at San Marcos Springs and see these Springs bubbling out.

They intuitively understand this is cool.

And that this isn't something that should just go away you know, but it's, it's, it's those experiences I think that are really crucial.

And the other important piece of the tool is knowledge is understanding that resource.

Education is really crucial, I think, for ensuring the communities that that the people in this region know how important our groundwater resources are.

[Nick] What I would like to see is not only the community coming together to clean the river but I would also like to see the public educated about the river.

I really think change will come from education.

If people know the things going on, then it will change for the better.

A lot of people just don't know.

- We are going to have to do much more intensive education than we have been doing, or we will see harmful results to our rivers and our lakes and everywhere.

[Dr Rose] I don't think you gain anything by keeping the public out of things.

If you walked up, for them to understand what some of the issues are you have to have an educational system that does that.

And the strengths here in this spring is the base turtle study.

And it would be nice down the line after I'm gone, if somebody else would be able to come in here and continue to follow this study.

- I'm always one for watching documentaries, always one for loving Nat Geo or just watching videos.

But the San Marcos River gave me an outlet to make a difference.

By working in the river every day, I saw an opportunity that most people overpass.

I saw an opportunity to make a change in the San Marcos River and I'm acting on it.

[Nick M] Back then when I was an undergrad, I would do this thing called the conservation crew.

We worked on the river and we went up and down the river to tell people about the endangered species to pick up trash.

And at that point you know, I just kind of realized like, you know, this is my dream.

I want to be working in, on or around the San Marcos River.

To like be in this position right now to be able to still do it, it's just, you know, it's like, I can't even express it in words you know.

[Dianne] It's really an economic important driver.

It's a quality of life for those of us who live in central Texas.

We love our springs and rivers, for many of us, it's why we live here.

- Reason I'm making this documentary is to show people how beautiful this river is, to show them why we do what we do.

Just pick up after yourselves.

Just watch where you're dumping litter and spread the knowledge that you've learned to other people.

Because some people just may not know.

I think a lot of the issue is just people just don't know.

I don't think that it's disrespect.

I think it's just, they just don't know what they're doing and how easily we could all lose it.

I hope that showing them showing them the changes that are happening hopefully it will change them.

[upbeat music]