flaming tumbleweeds

Sometimes the river is very cold, lately around 5 degrees celsius. On these days lighting a lunch fire is a fabulous thing. It can be hard to find good firewood by the fiver, so the other day we just lit tumbleweeds on fire and they produced four foot tall columns of flame. Awesome.

Sometimes there are big muddy holes along the river. Sometimes we fall in them.

Yum, fresh bass. We have to remove non-native fish we find, and what better way than to eat them whole?

Fish get into places you'd never imagine. So to sample, we have to crawl down storm drains, through irrigation ditches, and so on.

During breeding season, the speckled dace gets bright red lipstick markings... the male speckled dace that is.

This bullfrog was found dead in the river. He was snuck into a backpack as a joke and carried several miles down the river, carried in the bed of our truck over 20 miles of dirt roads back to the office, thrown on the windshield of one of our cars...

It's incredible how entertaining a dead bullfrog can be when you're freezing cold from being in the river.

Three happy fish techs and one happy chub.

Save the Woundfin! Kill the Red Shiner!

So finally, here are some pictures of what I actually do for work. We have two endangered species in the Virgin River, the woundfin, and the Virgin River chub. These woundfin have little neon green tags in them so we know when and where we stocked them if we catch them during monitoring.


The Virgin River chub is one of the bigger fish in the river, and feeds on the smaller minnows. Both of these fish are found nowhere but the Virgin River, and the woundfin is confined to only 16 miles of river, making it one of the rarest fish in the world.


These fish are in trouble because of human water consumption and because of this fish here, the red shiner (we sometimes call them red devils). Introduced from the Mississippi into Lake Mead as a bait fish, the shiner has moved up the Virgin River, breeding 12 times a year, eating native fish eggs, and outcompeting natives for resources.

To get rid of red shiner, we treat the river with rotenone, a poison which kills fish by damaging their gills (so people, birds, cats, etc. are safe as we have no gills). Before treating, we salvage what native fish we can and move them upstream. Then, we work crazy long days to make sure we treat every backwater, puddle, and ditch along them river so there are no refuges for red shiner. Fish can survive in places you'd never imagine, like inside this rock wall that I am spraying with rotenone treated water.


We also stock hatchery bred native fish to boost population numbers. Here Laura is checking the temperature on a cooler full of woundfin being acclimated to river temperature.


Go out into the world, little woundfin! And make lots of woundfin babies!