The trispot darter was thought to be completely lost from Alabama’s waterways for more than 50 years before a population was found in the Coosa River watershed in 2008. Now the colorful freshwater fish could be winnowing its way onto the Endangered Species List.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to decide by 2017 whether or not to protect the trispot darter under the Endangered Species Act as part of a settlement agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group that advocates for species.
The Center filed a lawsuit after lengthy delays in seeking protections for seven species of freshwater fish or mussels found in the Southeast, and the settlement includes a schedule of deadlines for a decision on each species.
“We petitioned for protection for these fish five years ago, and the Fish and Wildlife Service hadn’t issued a decision yet,” said Tierra Curry, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We filed a lawsuit and settled with the Fish and Wildlife Service to get dates for them to decide whether or not to protect them.”
The wildlife service will decide whether to propose the species in question be placed on the endangered species list as threatened or endangered, or on a waiting list, or that no action is warranted.
The agreement also included the frecklebelly madtom, a small catfish found in the Alabama, Cahaba and Tombigbee Rivers in Alabama. The wildlife service agreed to reach a decision on the frecklebelly madtom by September 2020.
“Alabama has more kinds of freshwater animals than anywhere in the world, and I think that is so amazing and cool and a lot of people aren’t even aware of it,” Curry said. “These two fish represent a whole group of amazing colorful little fish that live in Alabama’s rivers that are threatened with extinction.”
The trispot darter was believed to be extirpated from Alabama waters, largely thanks to the completion of dams along the Coosa River that inundated the shallow creeks and tributaries where it lives. The trispot darter had not been documented in the state since 1958 when biologists with the Geological Survey of Alabama and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service collected three males in Little Canoe Creek in St. Clair County in October 2008.
The trispot darter is known to exist in other tributaries of the Coosa River in Georgia and southeastern Tennessee.
Other species included in the settlement include the ashy darter (thought to be lost in Alabama), candy darter, longhead darter, sickle darter and yellow lance freshwater mussel.
In a previous settlement with the Center for Biologic Diversity, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to decide by 2018 whether the holiday darter and slenderclaw crayfish are deserving of protection under the Endangered Species Act.
“We’ve got a huge workload to deal with because we do have such a huge diversity of wildlife,” Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Tom MacKenzie said of that settlement. “Our goal is to conserve species, not list species.
“If there are ways of conserving them and keeping them off the (endangered species) list, we’ll do that.”
2015 Alabama Media Group