Endangered
Owens pupfish
Cyprinodon radiosus
Owens pupfish is a ray-finned fish in the family Cyprinodontidae (order Cyprinodontiformes) — Cyprinodon radiosus, recorded as Endangered and tied to United States.
Appearance
The male is blue-gray, turning bright blue during spawning. The female is greenish brown with a silvery or whitish belly.
This pupfish is up to 5 centimetres (2.0 inches) long, the largest males sometimes longer.
Range and habitat
It is endemic to California in the United States, where it is limited to the Owens Valley.
In 2021, another population of Owens pupfish was established at the River Spring Lakes Ecological Reserve in Mono County, California. To establish this new population, pupfish were sourced from the five other extant populations and translocated to the approximately 650-acre (264-hectare) reserve.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
When captured during the summer, both male and female fish were not in breeding season and died out within days despite being placed in the spring water they are used to living in.
In crisis
By 1942 this pupfish was believed to be extinct. It was rediscovered in 1969, when one population of about 800 individuals was found. When they were transferred to a safer location by Phil Pister, a retired district fishery biologist, the entire global population of this pupfish was contained in two buckets.
The California Department of Fish and Game established six populations in carefully managed refuge using these fish. While not all of the original six populations still exist today, the CDFW is still protecting and maintaining the population.
Owens pupfish is 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 Owens pupfish, Wikidata item Q305777. 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.
