What We Do
Mission Statement:
Conservation Fisheries is dedicated to the preservation of aquatic biodiversity and ecosystems in the southeastern United States, concentrating on the conservation and recovery of rare freshwater fishes using captive propagation, habitat assessment, and low impact monitoring techniques.
At any given time, our hatchery might house two dozen or more species of rare fishes. We are working to propagate many of these. For most of these species, the ultimate goal would be to return them to natural habitat from which they have been lost.
Occasionally, a fish is so rare that some of the remaining population has to be maintained in captivity in case the wild population is lost. Maintaining an "ark population" is a last resort action to conserve genetic stocks for severely imperiled species. We propagate some fish in order to maintain ark populations.
We sometimes work with close relatives of extremely rare fishes in order to develop propagation techniques. We call these stand-in species "surrogates." We have successfully used this approach on several occasions. Learn more about surrogate studies here.
An exciting new project involves developing protocols for propagating fishes as hosts for the larvae of rare mussels.
Some of our most interesting work involves monitoring rare fish populations in the wild. We employ non-invasive monitoring methods, primarily snorkel surveys, that we have developed.