[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Limnology Was "Re: NFC: Fw: Yes, please help me.
Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>
> >I thought Crater Lake was the only natural home of the bigmouth crater
> fish!
> >Just kidding, if it does have a natural fish population it speaks volumes
> >about natural mechanisms that spread fish from one body of water to another
> >naturally.
>
> How bout the feces of other animals? Couldnt fish eggs live if not
> completelly digested?
> How bout in birds feathers? Couldnt young fish fry swim into the feathers
> and get stuck and then washed out when the lets say a duck is swimming
> through the water of another lake? Or eggs on leafs that the fished layed
> eggs on and the wind blowed the leaf off the surface and into another lake
> and the egg stuck to the surface of the leaf. Also what about fish that
> escaped from the grasp of a predatious bird.
I get blasted by the academics and regulators, all of whom have a deeply
vested interest in "endangered species" and in the truth of arguments about
desert fish being isolated for 10s of thousands of years. Man is one of
those natural spreaders, IMHO. The adaptability and changes in the fish are
grossly underestimated by an academic and regulatory climate that values
"control" over objective science.
Growing up, as a kid on the desert, I watched miners and truck drivers
dumping their stale water bags and refilling at every clean spring they
encountered. Shards of indigenous inhabitant's pottery around the more
remote of those springs convinces me miners and prospectors were *far* from
the first ones to do that. Crater Lake isn't the only "deep hole" able to
have fish in it. Look at a topo map of Saline Valley in eastern CA for
example. Waters that hold Damnbusia and Goldfish now, had Empetrichthys
(probably) as recently as the 50s.
I defy anyone, not a trained osteologist, to tell most of the (non-saline)
desert pupfish apart. Robert R. Miller, between the 40s and 70s split the
pupfish of Death Valley (and Owens Valley) into a host of species and
sub-species (eleven of those!). Suspecting that motivation for the splitting
was more political than scientific, my studies indicate that the divisions
ought to be considered highly suspect.
The famed "Devil's Hole" Pupfish, suddenly looks about like a *nevadensis*
when raised in conditions outside the mountain hole from which it was taken
(it is in three refuges). This renders some of the Supreme Court arguments a
lot less convincing to the non-academic outsider. The rancher, whose water
rights were taken away in gross violation of the "takings clause" of the
constitution, probably had pretty decent reason for spreading "Kill the
Pupfish" bumper stickers. Spotted Owl sub-species differentiation has been a
political football, too, not too far from Crater Lake.
My (unfunded) studies are concentrating on obvious differences between two
populations of *Cypr. nevadensis mionectes* that were separated only 20
years ago, in a known event. Already, size, markings and breeding behaviour
are showing adaptive differences. These changes are not very unlike those we
see in African killies even after only a few generations in captivity. [I
maintain one African species that is about F28, at this point!]
IMHO, man is far and away the likliest spreader of fishes to remote waters.
Otherwise, how can I catch a nice Loch Leven (Brown?) Trout, from Scotland,
in eastern Sierra waters of California?
Wright
--
Wright Huntley, Fremont CA, USA, 510 494-8679 huntleyone at home dot com
"DEMOCRACY" is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.
"LIBERTY" is a well-armed lamb denying enforcement of the vote.
*** http://www.self-gov.org/index.html ***
References: