Critically Endangered
Bonytail chub
Gila elegans
Bonytail chub is a minnow in the family Cyprinidae (order Cypriniformes) — Gila elegans, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Like many other desert fishes, its coloring tends to be darker above and lighter below, serving as a camouflage. Breeding males have red fin bases. Bonytail chubs have bodies that sometimes arch into a smooth, predorsal hump (in adults).
A bonytail chub can grow to 62 cm (2 ft) long.
Range and habitat
This fish is native to the Colorado River Basin of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Southwestern United States. It has been extirpated from the part of the basin in Mexico. It was once abundant and widespread in the basin, its numbers and range have declined to where it has been listed as endangered since 1980 (Endangered Species Act of 1973) and 1986 (IUCN), a fate shared by the other large Colorado basin endemic fish species such as the Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, and razorback sucker. It is now the rarest of the endemic big-river fishes of the Colorado River.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Little is known about their reproductive habits, but they are thought to spawn in midsummer and perhaps hybridize with both roundtail and humpback chubs. Spawning in Lake Mohave has been observed during May, while in the upper Green River, it occurs in June and July.
In crisis
The bonytail chub's population sizes are small and declining. The depletion of the population is primarily due to the habitat alterations caused by dams and competition and predation by non-native fish. A USFWS Recovery Plan established in 1990 included the objectives of protecting the habitats of the bonytail chub, and even reintroducing hatchery-reared fish into the wild.
The Bonytail Chub Recovery Plan was approved on September 4, 1990, and refugia for the bonytail chub exist today in several places: Dexter National Fish Hatchery, New Mexico. Arizona Game and Fish Page Springs Hatchery; ouray National Wildlife Refuge, Ouray, Utah; buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, Sasabe, Arizona, and Niland Native Fish Ponds, California.
Bonytail chub is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Bonytail chub, Wikidata item Q3756661. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
