Presumed Extinct: Fish Out of Water

LOST SPECIES OF THE BAY AREA

Presumed Extinct: Clear Lake splittail, thicktail chub

As with the presumed extinct ivory-billed woodpecker reported in Arkansas in 2004, there is always the chance that a long-lost plant or animal will be rediscovered, thanks to persistent searching and luck. That’s true even in a busy metropolitan area like the San Francisco Bay Area. In May 2005, botanist Michael Park stumbled upon a population of Mount Diablo buckwheat (Eriogonum truncatum) on the slopes of Mount Diablo. The buckwheat was a  species long thought extinct, last seen in 1936 by UC Berkeley botany graduate student (and later Save Mount Diablo cofounder) Mary Bowerman. 

Spurred by the rediscovery of the buckwheat, it bears asking today which plants and animals endemic to – but presumed extinct in – the San Francisco Bay Area scientists continue to search for in the hope they may still be hanging on by a thread, waiting to be found and protected.

Clear Lake splittail (Pogonichthys ciscoides)

thicktail chub (Gila crassicauda)

Thicktail chub (Gila crassicauda), top, and Clear Lake splittail (Pogonichthys ciscoides), foreground. Illustration by Devin Cecil-Wishing.

With major fisheries teetering on the brink of collapse, it’s unlikely that many people have noticed the plight of two Bay Area endemic minnows that haven’t touched a creel in 30 years or more. The Clear Lake splittail (Pogonichthys ciscoides), the lake-bound cousin of the Sacramento splittail (P. macrolepidotus), is said to have schooled in great numbers in Clear Lake, the largest natural lake in California. In April and May, the eight-inch-long splittail would venture into upstream tributaries to spawn. Three weeks later, the young would return to the lake to feed on zooplankton and the native Clear Lake gnat in silvery schools that led early settlers to call them “silversides.” In the early 1940s, Clear Lake splittail populations plummeted, but it wasn’t until 1973 that the fish was belatedly recognized as a species. At about that time splittail vanished from the lake, replaced by non-native bluegill and, ironically, the inland silverside (Menidia beryllina). The latter was introduced in 1967 by the state to control vast clouds of annoying but harmless Clear Lake gnats, and it likely outcompeted Clear Lake splittail for shallow shoreline habitat. Other factors that may have tipped the species toward extinction were the channelization and the diversion of Clear Lake’s tributaries, where the splittail spawned.

Although its bones dominate Native American middens along the Sacramento River, Putah Creek, and the Pajaro-Salinas drainage, the thicktail chub (Gila crassicauda) is even less well known. This four-inch-long chub was also found in Clear Lake, the Delta, the Napa River, Alameda Creek, and several other Bay tributaries. Up until the late 19th century, thicktail chub weren’t uncommon in San Francisco fish markets, and their remains have been recovered from 19th-century Chinese privies in the city’s Mission District. But as early as 1884 their populations were reportedly waning. In 1957, the last known specimen was caught in the Sacramento River near Rio Vista. Throughout the species’ range, stream diversions and modifications, the loss of tule beds and shallow lowland lakes, and the introduction of largemouth bass and other nonnative predators likely drove the thicktail chub to extinction.

Since both the San Francisco estuary and Clear Lake are regularly sampled, UC Davis fisheries biologist Peter Moyle says the likelihood of finding either species is close to zero. But Robert Leidy, an ecologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, remains optimistic about the thicktail chub. “It could possibly show up in any part of its historical habitat,” says Leidy. “It could be upper Coyote Creek, it could be the Pajaro drainage, it could be in North Bay marshes or the Petaluma River.”

Field Guide to the Lost Species of the Bay Area

SPECIES: Clear Lake splittail (Pogonichthys ciscoides)

LISTING STATUS: none

FIRST/LAST RECORDED: ~1930/~1970

RANGE: known only from Clear Lake in Lake County

HABITAT: Clear Lake and its tributary waters, plus an outlying record from Cache Creek (downstream of Clear Lake)

FIELD NOTES: a lake-bound cousin of the Sacramento splittail (P. macrolepidotus), Clear Lake’s shoreline splittail wasn’t officially described until 1973, approximately the time it went extinct; aside from geographic isolation, the differences between the species are morphological; compared to the Sacramento splittail, the Clear Lake splittail has more gill rakers, more lateral line scales, smaller fins, a terminal mouth with absent or reduced barbels, and a relatively symmetrical tail fin

RESOURCES:

Inland Fishes of California, by Peter B. Moyle

Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of California, March 13, 1996, by Samuel M. McGinnis

_______________________________________________

SPECIES: thicktail chub (Gila crassicauda)

LISTING STATUS: none

FIRST/LAST RECORDED: present in Native American middens/1957

RANGE: reported specifically in Sacramento River, Putah Creek, Pajaro-Salinas drainage, Clear Lake, San Francisco Bay, Coyote Creek, Central Valley lowlands, and Bay tributary streams

HABITAT: lowland lakes, sloughs, slow-moving river stretches, and surface waters of the San Francisco Bay

FIELD NOTES: thicktail chub remains are reportedly common in Native American middens along the Sacramento River, and have been recovered from 19th-century Chinese privies in San Francisco’s Mission District; in the 19th century the fish was commonly sold in San Francisco fish markets and was served in Sacramento saloons; compared to other chub, the thicktail chub is a heavy-bodied fish with a small, cone-shaped head, greenish brown to purplish black back, and yellowish sides and belly

RESOURCES:

Inland Fishes of California, by Peter B. Moyle

Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of California, March 13, 1996, by Samuel M. McGinnis

The account excerpted above was originally featured in the October/December 2007 issue of Bay Nature magazine.

Illustrations by Devin Cecil-Wishing.

Book Review: The Owl and the Woodpecker

The Owl and the Woodpecker: Encounters with North America’s Most Iconic Birds, by Paul Bannick, The Mountaineers Books (http://www.mountaineersbooks.org), 2008, 200 pages, $ 26.95.

Maybe I’ve spent too many years looking down, scanning the ground for wildlife (I am, after all, a herpetologist), but it wasn’t until photographer Paul Bannick’s The Owl and the Woodpecker that I realized how critical a keystone species woodpeckers are to their winged cousins. In much the same way ground squirrels interweave the earth with burrows that become superhighways and refugia for fellow ground-dwelling insects, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, and even some birds (say, burrowing owls), so too does the woodpecker riddle the woods with cavities that become the tenements and penthouses for owls and an impressive array of woodland creatures.

Combining the best of both worlds, Bannick both shows and tells the rich natural histories of these two indicator species through well-researched text and jaw-dropping photography. Bannick, always fascinated by the glimpses of owls and woodpeckers fortune put in his path as a youth, decided in 2005 to photograph every North American woodpecker and owl as a way of drawing attention to these species’ plight and the questionable future of the sensitive habitats they depend on for survival. The result is a captivating compendium of facts and photography, a true testimony to Bannick’s mastery of light, timing, birding, and patience. In the scores of photographs Bannick carefully selected for these pages, his timing with the shutter freezes in place cascades of wood chips, wriggling insects bound for ravenous fledglings, the spray of feathers on touchdown, the buoyancy of wingtips on liftoff. Every page is one delight after the next, capturing the prismatic color and charisma of these spectacular birds.

Bannick’s photography unabashedly venerates the owl and the woodpecker, and rightfully so. If nothing else, Bannick’s work serves to remind us why it is so important to look up – to catch sight of these treetop totems.

Imperiled Amphibians of the West Poster

In 2003, the Pacific Rivers Council collaborated with renown herpetologist Dr. Robert C. Stebbins to prepare a poster illustrating the threatened and endangered frogs and salamanders of the Pacific West Coast. The result was this handsome wall-candy, Imperiled Amphibians of the West, a 23″ x 36″ full-color poster featuring Stebbins’ signature illustrations set against range maps for each species.

Among the species featured are California’s very own California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense), desert slender salamander (Batrachoseps major aridus), Santa Cruz long-toed salamander (Ambystoma macrodactylum croceum), Sacramento mountain salamander (Aneides hardii), California red-legged frog (Rana draytonii), mountain yellow-legged frog (Rana muscosa), Yosemite toad (Bufo canorus), western boreal toad (Bufo boreas boreas), Arroyo toad (Bufo califonicus), and western spadefoot toad (Spea hammondii).

According to PRC’s website, you can order the posters for $3.50 S&H by contacting info@pacrivers.org or (503) 228-3555 or – better yet, by following this link for a hi-res .pdf file.

UPDATE: Thanks to Kalei at PRC for the kind offer! PRC is waiving the S&H for (bio)accumulation readers; just email info@pacificrivers.org and tell them (bio)accumulation send you for your FREE wall-candy (see comments below for details).

Book Review: Hawks in Flight

Hawks in Flight (2nd ed.), by Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton, Houghton Mifflin Company (www.hmhbooks.com), 2012, 384 pages, $ 26.00.

In the parlance of birders, there are two kinds of known unknowns: the LBBs (“little brown birds”) and the BBBs (“big black birds”). Both acronyms are code for the befuddlement that ensues when confronted by a bird that moves too quickly or is too distant to identify on the fly. For as long as birding has been a hobby, field guides have struggled with how to guide their users toward a successful (and painless) species identification. And even though field guides marked a departure from the traditional shotgun approach (literally), to this day even the most detailed black and white illustrations, color photography, or careful field marks still handicap observers to what they can see through a pair of field glasses. At 100, 1,000, and 10,000 feet, the bird in flight is increasingly a different beast than the bird at rest. Field marks vanish, colors blur, and songs get carried away in the breeze.

With that in mind, Hawks in Flight tackles the lofty goal of hawk identification when your BBBs have taken to the skies. Unlike the recently reviewed Hawks at a Distance: Identification of Migrant Raptors – which capitalized on identification through photographs taken… well, at a distance against cloudy to brilliant skies – Hawks in Flight emphasizes a distant hawk’s gestalt and carriage – its patterns, posture, form, character, and placement in the sky. Hawks in Flights treats the silhouette as a bird in and of itself to scry the shadow’s caster.

Reprising their roles for this, the guide’s second edition, Dunne, Sibley, and Sutton have updated Hawks in Flight to include all hawks that breed in the United States and Canada, including the California condor. Following intuition rather than convention, the guide is broken up into chapters that lump birds easily mistaken for each other: the buteos (red-tailed hawk, red-shouldered hawk, broad-winged hawk, Swainson’s hawk, rough-legged hawk, ferruginous hawk), the accipiters (sharp-shinned hawk, Cooper’s hawk, northern goshawk), the falcons (American kestrel, merlin, peregrine falcon, prairie falcon, gyrfalcon), and the eagles and vultures (bald eagle, golden eagle, turkey vulture), not to mention white-tailed kite, northern harrier, and osprey. These and other specialty chapters also cover east coast species, borderland species, Florida species, and other regional variants and subspecies. In each chapter, the focus is on wing shape, body proportions, areas of light and dark (patches, windows, commas, bars, stripes), and flight behavior. And in closing each chapter, there is an emphasis on teasing confusing species apart by examining the pitfalls and pratfalls of misidentification.

Pairing concise illustrations (Sibley, natch), sterling photography, and tried-and-true wisdom (“To simplify the identification process, don’t look at a hawk perched on the crossbar of a utility pole, perched on a tree along the highway, or soaring over a woodlot and wonder, ‘Now, which one of North America’s ten buteo species is that?’ Ask instead, ‘Is that a Red-tailed?’”), Hawks in Flight is both practical and revolutionary, helping to close the gap between bird and birder.

New Release: Northwest Fauna’s Western Pond Turtle “Handbook”

The Society for Northwestern Vertebrate Biology (SNVB) announced this month the publication of the long-awaited ”western pond turtle handbook,” Northwest Fauna 7 - Western Pond Turtle: Biology, Sampling Techniques, Inventory and Monitoring, Conservation and Management. The western pond turtle handbook’s release marks the culmination of years of hard work by editors R. Bruce Bury, Hartwell H. Welsh, David J. Germano, and Donald T. Ashton to record the biology, survey and sampling protocol, field procedures, and conservation/restoration strategies geared toward protecting the western pond turtle.

The 128-page handbook is only available through SNVB as a standalone Northwest Fauna biological monograph for $12.00 here. The table of contents is excerpted below; a full review will be posted in the coming weeks.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Objectives, Nomenclature and Taxonomy, Description, Status, and Needs for Sampling

Chapter 2. Synopsis of Biology

Chapter 3. Sampling Design Considerations

Chapter 4. Visual Encounter Surveys

Chapter 5. Sampling of Turtles: Trapping and Snorkeling

Chapter 6. Specialized Surveys: Nests, Hatchlings, and Young

Chapter 7. Field Procedures

Chapter 8. Conservation and Restoration Strategies

Chapter 9. Future Research and Management Actions