Saving The Santa Ana Sucker

Santa Ana Sucker

Santa Ana Sucker

Development and the encroachment of civilization on the Santa Ana River has heightened the possibility of the extinction of the Santa Ana Sucker Fish.
The Santa Ana Sucker Fish lives in two known areas: the Santa Ana River, which has its headwaters at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains near Highland and winds through San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties to its terminus in the Pacific Ocean, and in the Angeles National Forest’s San Gabriel River, in portions of its west, north and east forks, all of which are located in Los Angeles County.
The fish needs gravel-size rocks upon which to lay its eggs. Various activities along the Santa Ana River which dam up or stop the flow of the river water, along with the drought respresent a mortal danger to the species, Catostomus santaanae.
A freshwater ray-finned fish, the Santa Ana sucker has dark grey upper parts and silvery underparts. It grows to a maximum length of 10 inches, but most adults are much smaller. It feeds on algae, diatoms and detritus on the floor of shallow streams with sand, gravel or cobble bottoms. Because it is found in only a few streams in Southern California, and virtually all of those have at various spots been converted into concrete channels, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated this fish as “endangered.”
This fall, an extraordinary effort was made by volunteers to protect the fish along a portion of the river that is downstream from where the shutdown of a rapid infiltration and extraction wastewater treatment plant in Colton owned by the cities of San Bernardino and Colton took place for maintenance purposes.
Roughly 50 volunteers divided into six teams, some of them brought in by four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle, fanned out along a two-mile stretch of the Santa Ana River, where biologists believe upwards of 80 percent of the Santa Ana sucker fish yet living in the world reside, just prior to the shutdown of the plant, concentrating on those portions of the river where its contour and shallow depth would become the most likely spots where the fish would become stranded.
There are spots in the river where the water flows on a relatively constant basis and others where the water pools into something akin to ponds. With the closure of the plant, the water flow downstream from it essentially ceased, and many of the ponds dropped to critical levels.
The teams of volunteers stood by the ponds or moved from one to the other as the water continued to draw down and used nets to capture the fish, or in cases where they became stranded in mud used their hands, to put them into buckets of water fitted with oxygenators to keep the fish breathing during their confinement, which lasted for the roughly four hours the plant stayed closed. Some 650 fish were hauled out of the water and returned to their home once the river was again flowing. The following day, a survey of the critical span of the river turned up seven dead fish, significantly fewer than the 40 to 50 that typically dies previously when the plants along the river are shut down.
The November effort was the fourth such operation during rapid infiltration and extraction plant shutdowns organized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since early 2015.

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