| The US Fish and Wildlife Service has released the Rio Grande Silvery Minnow Recovery Plan ,which was three years in the making. Meanwhile, the latest monitoring indicates that the silvery minnow is closer to extinction than ever.
The recovery plan is one of the first prepared under new guidance requiring participation from "stake holders" (in this case, mostly the same folks involved in creating the crisis in the first place). The recovery team consisted of 22 white males (including Colorado and Texas agency representatives) presenting their own special interests. Previous Endangered Species recovery plans have been prepared by biologists. In this plan––for which Amigos Bravos was the sole "environmental representative"––the biologists were certainly the only voice of reason. Again and again, the biologists warned that the numbers of silvery minnows are decreasing in the upper stretches of their present range, and are being forced into an increasingly smaller area, making the entire population vulnerable to a single catastrophic event.
The biologists stressed that, if the minnow to survive, two key issues must be resolved: 1) having enough water to keep the river wet year-round and provide a peak flow in the spring, and 2) providing a way for the fish to migrate throughout the middle Río Grande.
The silvery minnow spawn is triggered by the increasing flows of the spring runoff. The eggs then drift with the current for up to three days before the larvae are able to move out of the fast moving water. As they float downstream, the eggs and young larvae are often carried over irrigation diversion structures such as the ones at Isletta and San Acacia. None of these diversion structures provide fish ladders or other means for the fish to migrate back upstream. Consequently, the population is forced further and further downstream. Unfortunately, the lowest stretch of river, which contains over ninety percent of the remaining world population of the Río Grande silvery minnow, is a section often dewatered by the irrigation demands of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
So what is to be done? The plan speaks eloquently about how "a shift should be made from relying on reactive management to relying on preventative management" and the need for ecosystem management, defined as "the integration of scientific knowledge of ecological relationships within a complex sociopolitical and values framework toward the general goal of protecting native ecosystem integrity over the long term." Great words of wisdom, yet the silvery minnow is closer than ever to extinction. The plan calls for several studies and outlines a number of actions, but will these actions take place in time to save the minnow?. On November 15, US Fish and Wildlife Service is bringing in an expert to look at the feasibility of creating fish passage structures at each of the irrigation dams on the Middle Río Grande. The best solution may be to take the dams down and build less obstructive diversion structures. |
