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Photo © copyright Gordon Swenson
As Goes the Least Chub, So Goes the Snake Valley
The Center for Biological Diversity, Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation, Great Basin Chapter of Trout Unlimited, and Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club filed a petition today to protect the least chub, a rare fish species found only in Utah, as a threatened or endangered species under the federal Endangered Species Act. The least chub has been reduced to just six fragile wild populations, three of which occur in the Snake Valley, where planned pumping of water for runaway growth in Las Vegas is a serious threat to their survival. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has twelve months to determine whether protection is warranted.
“The least chub is on the edge of extinction,” stated Noah Greenwald, conservation biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The chub is an important part of the web of life in Utah and needs the effective protection of the Endangered Species Act to survive.”
Least chub were once widely distributed in the rivers, streams, marshes and springs over much of Utah west of the Wasatch Front. Today, they are found natually in just six complexes of springs and ponds, where they are threatened by a combination of non-native fish, particularly mosquito fish, livestock grazing, suburban sprawl, and of greatest concern, proposed groundwater pumping by the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), that has proposed to drill nine groundwater pumping stations just inside Nevada from the Utah/Nevada border in Snake Valley to withdraw up to 25,000 to 30,000 acre feet a year of ground water.
“In 30 years of working with the least chub, I’ve seen populations drop precipitously in the face of excessive groundwater pumping, exotic species, and other factors,” stated Don Duff, president of the Great Basin Chapter of Trout Unlimited, former federal fisheries biologist, and a landowner in Snake Valley. “Decline of the least chub is an indicator of declining water tables that will also harm farmers, ranchers and dozens of other species that depend on desert streams and springs of the Snake Valley, including the Bonneville cutthroat trout—state fish of Utah.”
The least chub was proposed for protection as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1995, but protection was never finalized based in part on the efforts of Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to conserve the fish. These efforts culminated in the development of a conservation agreement and strategy in 1998, which called for, among other things, surveys to clarify the chub’s status and creation of new populations through translocation. These admirable efforts resulted in finding one new population and establishment of four refuge populations in recent years in largely human–modified habitats. These efforts, however, will be undermined if SNWA is allowed to move forward with groundwater pumping and if more is not done to protect populations from ongoing threats, such as non-native fish and suburban sprawl.
"The least chub is an ambassador from an imperiled ecosystem--desert springs in western Utah," stated Mark Clemens from the Utah Chapter of Sierra Club. "If we can save this fish, we know we will have protected an ecosystem and the people whose lives depend on it for future generations."
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