Chloe Podkonjak and Brandon Gibson with the Albuquerque BioPark are releasing silvery minnows from the Rio Grande into the river this week. The system released 42,000 fish at three locations. (Courtesy of ABQ BioPark)
Thousands of silvery minnows from the Rio Grande were released into the river this week after months of loving care at Albuquerque BioPark.
Crews moved 42,000 of the fish through a large tube into the Rio Grande as part of the facility’s endangered species recovery effort.
Kathy Lang, the BioPark’s water conservation and operations manager, said each 1.5-inch-long fish was injected with a visible marker just under the skin.
“The markers are for people who are doing surveys in the river to keep track of the minnow population,” Lang said. “If they caught a bunch of fish, but they were hatching fish, it wouldn’t necessarily show how the natural population in the river is recovering.”
Rio Grande Silvery Minnow (Courtesy Joel Lusk / US Fish and Wildlife Service)
The team released 14,000 fish each at the Central Bridge in Albuquerque, the northern border of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and a location near Jarales south of Belen.
In the spring, aquatic biologists collected the fish as eggs from the river.
The eggs were distributed between BioPark, a US fish and wildlife farm in Dexter, and the silvery minnow sanctuary of Los Lunas.
“You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak,” Lang said. “The early stages of life are the most critical.”
The habitat of the minnow in the BioPark hatchery mimics ideal natural conditions so that as many fish as possible can survive in order to produce more minnows.
“As they get older, we put them in outdoor pools that have a larger selection of natural foods like seaweed,” Lang said. “We are slowly getting them away from being so dependent on human care.”
Fish and Wildlife determine the river locations where wild minnow populations need to be increased by hatching fish.
Silvery minnows were classified as Endangered in 1994.
The fish was once found in Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. But now the tiny fish occupy a smaller habitat from Cochiti Pueblo to Elephant Butte Reservoir.
Theresa Davis is a member of the Report for America Corps, a water and environmental researcher for the .
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