Endangered Fish Struggles to Survive in Santa Clara River
Thirty-one years after the unarmored threespine stickleback landed on the federal list of endangered species, the beleaguered little fish continues to occupy a stretch of the Santa Clara River that runs through Soledad Canyon, just outside Santa Clarita.
But after more than three decades of federal protection, the stickleback faces a whole new set of threats, as well as most of those that endangered the fish in the first place.
Over the years, the stickleback--an unusual subspecies that lacks the bony structures, or plates, typical of its kind--has outwitted one nemesis after another, from giant clawed frogs to human neighbors who have cavalierly dynamited stretches of the river.
“I’m surprised, from what I’ve seen over the last 12 years, that it’s hung on so long,” said Shawna Bautista, 41, a ranger in Angeles National Forest whose job includes tending the fish.
According to the team that wrote the stickleback’s official recovery plan in 1977 and revised it in 1985, the stickleback survives despite enemies, old and new--but just barely.
“It’s under more pressure now than it used to be,” said 51-year-old Tom Haglund, of Sherman Oaks, an advisor to the six-person recovery team and an environmental consultant. Continuing urbanization is a major threat, especially development by such large land holders on the river as the Newhall Land & Farming Co. So is the invasion of a predatory plant, giant reed or arundo donax, which grows more than 2 inches a day, spreads like kudzu and sucks up water--never good for the continued survival of a fish.
But the greatest perils, Haglund said, may be the stickleback’s lack of charisma and its low public profile. Its ability to survive the occasional oil spill and other assaults on its habitat, he said, “may make us complacent, and there’s always a danger in complacency.”
Human Population Threatens Fish Habitat
Also worrisome to Haglund is that the recovery plan has not been revised for more than 15 years, despite developments that make the fish’s survival less likely. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the federal agency that approved the original plan and its revision, and it currently has no plans for another revision, according to Jane Hedron, a spokeswoman in its Carlsbad office.
But, as Haglund pointed out, the human population has boomed all around the fish’s refuge, putting it at greater and greater risk. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of the city of Santa Clarita jumped 35%, to more than 151,000. Moreover, recent studies indicate that the stickleback--one of 71 endangered animal species in California--is not as widespread as once thought.
When the recovery plan was revised, Haglund said, it was thought that there were unarmored threespine stickleback in San Antonio Creek on Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc. Since then, genetic tests have revealed that the fish look like the unarmored stickleback in the Santa Clara River, but they are not close relatives genetically.
As a result, the Vandenberg look-alikes can’t help the local stickleback recover. “There was a time when we thought we had other populations, and now we don’t,” Haglund said.
Several of the recovery team’s recommendations have never been carried out, such as reintroducing the fish in areas where they once swam and creating a holding facility in case of a catastrophe. Moreover, Haglund said, Fish and Wildlife no longer consults regularly with the recovery team. This worries Haglund “when there’s so much activity on the Santa Clara River now where the expertise of the recovery team would be valuable.”
The teams typically go inactive after delivering their recovery plans, a Fish and Wildlife spokesman said.
One of four fish native to the Santa Clara River, along with the arroyo chub, the Pacific lamprey and the Southern steelhead trout, the stickleback is a tiny treasure to environmentalists. They marvel at the beauty of the courting males--silver fish no bigger than a child’s pinkie, with bright red throats and turquoise flanks and eyes. When full of eggs, the somewhat larger females are a golden olive color.
“They’re amazing little fish,” said Bautista, who does an annual sampling in Soledad Canyon to gauge how well the fish are doing. “They live in a harsh environment, for a fish,” she said. The Santa Clara has raging floods and sometimes dries to a trickle, she said, “and they still manage to hang on.”
Bautista, who has monitored the fish for 12 years, said the population trend is “downward, unfortunately.” Every July or August, she dips a net at 100-meter intervals into the mile-long stretch of the stream within the national forest, then counts the fish. In 1991, she found a record 784 stickleback; in 1998, only 23. Bautista said she does not know the total number of fish now in the protected habitat.
Stickleback Doesn’t Inspire Sympathy
In many ways, the plight of the stickleback is that of every endangered species that isn’t big, beautiful or awe-inspiring. “People like what I call ‘fuzzies,’ ” Haglund said. “They like cuddly things. You can put a panda up, and everybody has sympathy for the plight of the panda. When you’re talking about fish that are 1 1/2 inches long, people say, ‘So what?’ ”
Jonathan Baskin, a biology professor at Cal Poly Pomona on the recovery team, agrees that the stickleback does not automatically trigger sympathy as some charismatic species do. “They’re not as spectacular as things with fur,” he said, “but they’re still pretty neat.”
As Baskin and other scientists are aware, Gasterosteus aculeatus williamsoni is an American cousin to the European stickleback, studied by pioneering Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He observed that stickleback in an aquarium became agitated whenever a red mail truck went by. By dropping objects of different colors and shapes into the tank, he showed that the males become aggressive and the females receptive to the males in the presence of the color red.
Tinbergen later described what a Forest Service sign in Soledad Canyon terms the fish’s “flash dance,” the ritual zigging and zagging the red-throated males do to attract females. He also observed that the males are territorial and guard the eggs in their nests.
Baskin thinks the public would be more zealous in its concern for the stickleback if it knew more about them. The Forest Service is reluctant to trumpet the presence of the stickleback for fear that some deranged individual might harm it. But Baskin speculates that the stickleback would benefit from greater public awareness.
“I’m surprised the Forest Service doesn’t do more with it,” he said. “They should advertise: ‘Home of the endangered stickleback. We’ve got it here! Come see it!’ ”
But the Forest Service remains ambivalent about the juxtaposition of people and fish. It closed its campground in Soledad Canyon in the early 1990s and has not reopened it out of concern for the stickleback and other at-risk species, Bautista said.
Angeles National Forest attracts about 8 million visitors a year, and one individual can do enormous damage to a species hanging on by its fins. Recently, Bautista said, the only other significant group of unarmored threespine stickleback, in nearby San Francisquito Canyon, was devastated by an outbreak of ick, a parasitic disease. Unarmored stickleback are especially vulnerable because they lack plates. The Forest Service suspects someone dumped a sick goldfish or other aquarium pet with ick into the stream.
In the mid-1980s stickleback watchers feared that it might be wiped out by the African clawed frog, an exotic species that probably escaped from a lab or pet shop. The clawed frogs are still in the stickleback’s habitat, and they are still voracious. But the frogs and the fish seem to have established some sort of equilibrium.
Forest Service Has Limited Jurisdiction
As more and more people move into the area, the need for water increases, as does the threat to fish habitat. Since most of Soledad Canyon is in private hands, the Forest Service can do little to keep landowners from modifying the stream as it runs through their property. Even if the changes violate the law, fines are infrequent and they don’t undo the damage, Bautista said.
Bautista has been active in removing the aggressive grass arundo from the habitat. “It’s my favorite arch-nemesis,” she said. She proudly points to stretches where arundo once towered over the stickleback’s stream but has been beaten back.
The arundo is relentless, but it is something Bautista can deal with. She has far less control over man-made changes to how and where the stream flows. Currently, she said, there is an area downstream of the main habitat that dries up every year. That dry area acts as a barrier that protects the genetic integrity of the unarmored fish by keeping them away from partially armored stickleback, common downstream. Without the barrier, the two types of stickleback might mate, and the endangered one could be lost forever.
Baskin’s prescription for the stickleback can be summed up in a few sentences: “Leave the river alone. Protect the habitat, and the fish will protect itself.”
