Back to Silver King?

If anyone cares about the type of work I do, check this article out from High Country News by Hillary Rosner.  Different fish, but the idea is the same.  Especially with the Walker Lake tui chub. Walker Lake is a terminal lake in Nevada. Water mining has reduced inflow to the lake, causing increased salinity.  The tui chubs live a long time, so adults that were born in times of lower salinity are still alive. However the increasing salinity is bad for spawning and young (recruitment).  Same idea with other desert fishes - they live a long time so they are still around, but no babies are born, so bodies of water are sort of like retirement communities.  Lots of sex, but no babies.  Eww, I know.

Anyway, I don't really expect anyone to click on the link, so if you do, kudos!

Here's a particularly gnarly passage:


"In the 1950s and early 1960s, government officials also routinely poisoned waterways, killing native species in order to stock sport fish like rainbow trout. Using money given to the states from taxes on recreational fishing products, government officials poisoned 2,500 miles of streams and 225,000 acres of lakes in 34 states, according to Anders Halversson, whose new book, An Entirely Synthetic Fish, chronicles America's love affair with rainbow trout.
In 1962, the Wyoming and Utah wildlife agencies orchestrated the ne plus ultra of fish genocide, a massive effort to poison native fish using a chemical called rotenone. The idea was to create a clean slate on the Green River -- a main Colorado tributary originating in Wyoming's Wind River Range -- above the soon-to-be-completed Flaming Gorge Dam, eradicating all life in the water and then filling it with millions of rainbow trout. Using a series of "drip stations" strung along 450 miles of river, as well as airboats and helicopters, officials killed off 450 tons of fish in three days. "As the rotenone front progressed downstream," writes Halversson, "it drove large schools of desperate fish in front of it, a sight that deeply impressed itself on those who saw them ‘thrashing about and struggling for air on the surface of the river.' "


More on the fish front: I'm going to go back to Silver King Creek August 9th (the day after I get back from South Carolina...yay) to do some sampling of the "pure" populations of Paiute cutthroat trout.  My collaborator is looking for funding (possible post-doc?) to get a better grip on the genetic diversity of these populations.

In other news, I have a new gay boyfriend at the Lucky Jeans store in the Arden Fair mall. I went in to buy a new battery for my macbook (btw, the Apple store is complete fucking mayhem), and decided it was time for a new pair of jeans.  Eric and I got along very well, and he insisted that I did not have muffin tops ("I've SEEN muffin tops, you do NOT have muffin tops").  So mission accomplished for new jeans and a new battery. Getting a new battery has been an egregious task I've put off since realizing my battery was dead in Spain. That was in October.

For the weekend, maybe Column of the Giants with Ethan?  Who knows. People like to bail at the last minute.  I'll end up doing something, even if I have to go somewhere alone. I'll try to bribe him with cookie-brownies.