Conservation Fisheries                 "Preserving Aquatic Biodiversity in the Southeast"

Surrogate Species

  Sometimes a species is so rare that removing wild fish for study might impact the population negatively.  In these cases, we develop spawning and rearing techniques with a closely related species. Once protocols are developed, collecting the rare species to begin propagation efforts can be done with more confidence. 

   We first employed the use of surrogates with the boulder darter, Etheostoma wapiti. We were able to develop propagation techniques using the related bloodfin darter, E. sanguifluum. Bloodfin darters are much more common than the boulder darter. When we did “graduate” to propagating  boulder darters, we found their reproductive requirements to indeed be very similar to that of the bloodfin darter.  Thus, we were able to produce propagated boulder darters for the first time ever.

We have since expanded this technique to other imperiled fishes with considerable success.

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Conservation Fisheries © 2007