The Game and Fish Department is working hard to salvage the Rio Grande Cutthroat trout whose existence is threatened in the wake of the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico.
Conservationists rescued the trout from streams north of Las Vegas where the prized fish could have been impacted by mudslides from monsoons that can smother the bottom of streams where the fish spawn. Their gills can also become clogged with ash and mud.
“It’s after the high-intensity fire when there’s no vegetation right before the monsoon seasons that we need to go in and remove those fish so the mudslides don’t kill them,” Bryan Ferguson, Fisheries Biologist, New Mexico Game & Fish, told KRQE.
According to the KRQE report, crews from the U.S. Forest Service and New Mexico Game and Fish used electrofishing gear to stun as many fish as they could, and then moved them 300 miles south to Las Cruces.
“New Mexico State University has a fish holding facility,” Ferguson said. “And then they’ll stay there while we either, in this case, we needed to prep a stream for them to be placed into.”
Many of the fish have been transported north, where conservationists strapped buckets of fish to their backs and lugged them to the banks of a creek northeast of Red River.
“Doing active management like we’re doing is a way to make sure that they remain on the landscape and we can keep as many populations as we can,” Ferguson told KRQE.
The Rio Grande Cutthroat has had dwindling numbers because of disruptions to its habitat. It also has been forced to compete with non-native species stocked in local streams.