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Charismatic is hardly the best word to describe the humpback chub, a fish with a frowny eel face jammed onto a sportfish body in a way that suggests evolution has a sense of humor.
Nor did tastiness build a fan base for this “trash fish” across its natural habitat throughout the Colorado River Basin. But, in 1973, the humpback chub became famous by winning federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Researchers in the Grand Canyon now spend weeks at a time, several times a year, monitoring humpback chub, which has become central to an ecosystem science program with implications for millions of westerners who rely on Colorado River water.
Dennis Harris, who guides an electrofishing boat for a research contractor, is part of the science crew that briefed me last year at the world’s largest known humpback chub hangout, just below the confluence of the Little Colorado River with the Colorado in Arizona. He spun a yarn about what fish say upon their return to home waters—how they survived an alien abduction. |
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“They scooped me up in a net and took me to the Mother Ship and stuck me with a piece of glass and probed my genitals and brought me back here,’” Harris said, throwing his head back and splaying his arms to imitate fish stunned by the electric current.
“And all their friends go, ‘Yeah, right.’”
Funny as that sounds, the humpback chub’s experience is surprisingly meaningful now, as its river habitat deep in the iconic, redrock canyon becomes the subject of new scrutiny. New negotiations about the Colorado’s future begin later this year in a world that has fundamentally changed since foundational water agreements were drawn up, back when the river was flush and the entire basin was treated like a giant network of irrigation ditches. |
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