Red fish. Blue fish. Forty-two thousand fish. That’s how many freshwater fish specimens Roanoke College has in their Freshwater Fish Collection. Digital images of 800 of those are now in JSTOR and free for all to see. Click on the images below to zoom way in and see the scales on these beauties.
The images were used to illustrate Dr. Robert E. Jenkins’s and Noel Burkhead’s publication, Freshwater Fishes of Virginia, and represent specimens of fish from all over Virginia and neighboring states, which are disappearing at an alarming rate. According Noel M. Burhead, “In the twentieth century, freshwater fishes had the highest extinction rate worldwide among vertebrates. The modern extinction rate for North American freshwater fishes is conservatively estimated to be 877 times greater than the background extinction rate.” In other words, the rate of extinction is accelerating. “From 1898 to 2006, 57 taxa became extinct, and three distinct populations were extirpated from the continent. Since 1989, the numbers of extinct North American fishes have increased by 25%.”
Why should we care about freshwater fish in Virginia? As Burkhead explains it, “fishes are especially useful for evaluating environmental change, because biologists know much more about their biology than they do those of other aquatic biotas. Actually, declining fishes represent just the tip of the iceberg regarding losses of freshwater biota and their habitats.” As Burkhead puts it in his understated conclusion, “The fact that these [freshwater] fishes disappeared in only 110 years” demonstrates that “some of our resource practices are detrimental to the persistence of freshwater fishes and likely to that of other aquatic faunas.”
Click on the images below to zoom way in and see the scales on these suckers.
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September 13, 2020 at 07:29PM
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Freshwater Fish of Virginia - JSTOR Daily
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