INTRODUCTION 



The history of the marshes of the 

 Mississippi River Delta is inextricably 

 intertwined with the history of the river 

 itself. Like some ancient god, it broods 

 over the coastal plain, implacable in its 

 power, its purpose inscrutable. With its 

 sediment it spawns the flat, verdant 

 marshes of the delta, nourishes them with 

 its nutrients, and finally abandons them 

 to senesce slowly under the influence of 

 time and subsidence, while it renews the 

 cycle elsewhere along the coast. 



This community profile deals with the 

 facts and the quantitative analysis of 

 this cycle. But the cold numbers often 

 defy our comprehension. How much is 

 15,400 cubic meters per second (cLnecs) , 

 the average discharge of the Mississippi 

 River? How large is 0.2 y, the size of a 

 bacterium? And what does it mean to say 

 that there are one thousand million of 

 then in a cubic centimeter of marsh soil? 

 These scales are almost unimaginably 

 different, yet understanding a natural 

 ecosystem demands the ability to deal with 

 both. 



As one examines the technical details 

 of a system like a coastal marsh, the 

 complexity becomes increasingly apparent, 

 and the cold, technical analysis breaks 

 down more and more often into a sense of 

 wonder at the system's sophistication and 

 the delicate interplay of parts that make 

 up the whole. Migratory waterfowl's 

 ability to respond to subtle environmental 

 cues and navigate thousands of miles from 

 Alaskan prairie potholes to the Louisiana 

 coastal marshes rivals our most 

 sophisticated inertial guidance systems. 

 After years of study we still have little 

 understanding of how passively floating 

 shrimp larvae in the Gulf of Mexico find 

 their way through estuarine passes into 



the coastal marshes. The idea of energy 

 flow in ecological systems is still only a 

 guiding principle; the complex details of 

 molecular biochemistry in the marsh 

 substrate and the complexity of the 

 meiofaunal food chain are still largely 

 unexplored. 



This monograph details the human 

 struggle to understand, and through 

 understanding to manage the Mississippi 

 delta marshes. I will emphasize what we 

 know - and that is considerable - but I 

 hope that the presentation of technical 

 detail does not obscure the large areas of 

 uncertainty about how to manage the 

 system. Above all I hope that it does 

 not reduce the delta marshes to cold 

 statistics; for understanding, I believe, 

 is heightened by emotional involvement. 



MAN IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA 



When de Soto found and named the Rio 

 del Esperitu Santo, now the Mississippi 

 River, in 1543, the Indians had been 

 living on the coast for 12,000 years. 

 They preferred the easy living of the 

 marshes to the uplands because food was 

 abundant and easy to harvest. Oysters 

 and the Ranqia clam were in nearly endless 

 supply. Fish, turtles, and edible plants 

 were plentiful. The tribes now known as 

 Tchefuncte, Marksville, Troyville, Coles 

 Creek, Caddoan, Mississippian, and 

 Plaquemine settled on the slightly 

 elevated banks of river distributaries 

 where they literally ate themselves up out 

 of the water. As they ate oysters and 

 clams, the shells accumulated beneath them. 

 The evidence of these prehistoric villages 

 now dots the marshes as small groves of 

 trees on slightly elevated shell mounds in 

 an otherwise treeless vista (Figure 1). 



