FORT WORTH, Texas ? Wildlife biologists scooped up minnows from a shrinking Texas river Friday in one of the first rescues of fish threatened by the state's worst drought in decades.
Hundreds of smalleye shiners and sharpnose shiners were collected from the Brazos River, about 175 miles northwest of Fort Worth. They will be taken to the state's fish hatchery but returned to the river when the drought abates.
Scientists waded through the muddy river bed to reach the shallow pools of water, where they used a large net to scoop up the finger-size fish and put them in buckets.
With the water drying up in the drought, the fish don't have the 100 miles of river they need to reproduce. And, their life span is just two years, so scientists are scrambling to save the two species.
Both are candidates to be listed as threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. While they are the most abundant fish in the upper Brazos, they are found nowhere else in the world.
"If this drought continues for another year and they haven't reproduced . . . we may lose the entire population," said Gene Wilde, a fish ecology professor at Texas Tech who has spent much of his life studying fish in West Texas rivers.
Last week Wilde led a team that rescued the federally endangered Arkansas River shiner from the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle.
This kind of large-scale effort is rare. But as the drought persists, rescues could become more common for fish, amphibians and other creatures in Texas, which is home to 86 species considered endangered or threatened.
There has been a push for more fish rescues as early as this fall in Central and West Texas.
The San Saba, Colorado and Llano rivers are home to several species of mussels, some of which are listed as threatened in Texas and for which petitions are pending for federal status.
Several federally endangered species ? including the fountain darter and the Texas blind salamander ? could need rescuing from the Comal and San Marcos Springs, south of Austin. If stream flows drop to pre-determined levels, biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will evacuate as many samples of the species as possible.
About 88 percent of the state is in the worst stage of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor map released Thursday. Texas just finished its driest 11 months on record and is in its worst single-year drought ever. Texas also had the hottest June through August on record in the U.S.
When the Brazos River and its forks have healthy flows, the minnows live by picking bugs out of the water or sifting through the sandy dunes formed by currents. They can migrate more than 100 miles upstream to spawn and release their buoyant eggs to float downstream to hatch.
The 2-inch-long minnows are prey to game fish like catfish or largemouth bass, according to a release Thursday from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
"If we lose them, we won't have the same ecological vitality," Wilde said in the release.
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Blaney reported from Lubbock. AP photographer L.M. Otero contributed to this report from Sagerton.
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