4: Arkansas Darter
*glubbing noises*,
I write to you from Arapahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne land. I am interested in learning about the different animals that live in the place where I was born. I want to mention that biological classification as taught by western science has its roots in racism, sexism, and transphobia – here’s a good explainer about why.
Today is our first fish, which is a good time to mention that I know almost nothing about fish. Last night I was talking about fish as a concept with my partner and asked, “Yes, but what makes a fish? Do they have to have gills?” Googling suggests, yes, they have to have gills, and also that they have to have limbs lacking digits. Apologies if you already knew this.
The Arkansas Darter (Etheostoma cragini) lives, as you might expect, along the Arkansas River, and thus in the southeastern part of Colorado, as well as in other states including the Arkansas River – primarily Kansas, but also Missouri, Oklahoma, and, indeed, Arkansas. They enjoy eating small insects, their larvae, and sometimes seeds and other plant material – as a human, I recognize my fellow omnivore kin.
Various fish guides had little else to say about this species, so I hit google scholar to see if there was any interesting research. This led me to reading about the management strategy practiced by human agencies on the Darter. Like many fish, they are struggling with human effects on the Arkansas river, which has led to habitat fragmentation and changes in flow. I used to work at the Bureau of Land Management in western Colorado and it always amazed me what our fish biologists would do to manage local fish populations. How much humans have changed riparian systems in the last 100-150 years in the western USA means that it is difficult for me to imagine what this landscape looked like even when Colorado became a state, in 1876. Native people had been managing rivers and their stocks for millennia in a sustainable way, but the changes of industrialized agriculture and the population explosion that accompanied white settlement in the region occurred on an unimaginable scale. For example, when Colorado became a state, it had the smallest population of any state ever admitted (admitted to change the political balance of the election for Rutherford B. Hayes) – 35,629 non-Native people in the 1880 census, which today, 140 years later, is nearing 6 million. Early white settlers in the Denver area famously called the Platte “an inch deep and a mile wide”; they walled it in and controlled its flow and now it is barely twenty feet across in many places. No wonder fish, who rely on clean, moving water to lay their eggs, find their food, and traverse their landscape are having a hard time.
I am looking forward to learning more about fish as this journey continues!
Tomorrow we will meet one of my favorite animals to encounter while hiking…