Endangered
Cape Fear shiner
Notropis mekistocholas
Cape Fear shiner is a minnow in the family Cyprinidae (order Cypriniformes) — Notropis mekistocholas, recorded as Endangered and tied to United States.
Appearance
It is mostly a silvery yellowish shade with a black stripe running down the middle of the fish's side to its caudal peduncle and a lighter stripe above this one. The scales are outlined in black. The shiner's fins are clear to yellow and moderately pointed.
The Cape Fear shiner is a small but stocky minnow of about 5 centimetres (2 in) long with a maximum length of 7.7 centimetres (3 in).
Range and habitat
The Cape Fear shiner is endemic to the Upper Basin of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina's Piedmont. The largest of these populations is found where the Deep and Rocky Rivers meet. During the winter, shiners may migrate from their shoals in main river channels to smaller tributary streams.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The Cape Fear shiner's intestines are adapted to help the fish digest plants and they were initially suggested to be primarily herbivorous because of this adaptation. It is known to eat detritus, bacteria, phytoplankton, diatoms, and algae.
This shiner spawns around May 15 when the water temperature reaches 19 °C (66 °F). A second spawning may occur in the late summer. Both male and female change color while spawning, and the male develops a number of small tubercles along its upper body.
In crisis
As of 2013, the shiner is endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, due to its small population size and threats to its habitat from dam construction and pollution. It was previously listed as critically endangered by the IUCN in 1996. Even so, the species is still limited to just five populations in the wild, and some experts believe that a single toxic chemical spill into the Cape Fear River could wipe out the entire wild population.
The Cape Fear shiner is only known from five different populations, two of that are extremely small and run a high risk of extinction. The other three populations are more stable, and are estimated to number between 1500 and 3000 individual fish that are reproductively viable.
Cape Fear shiner 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 Cape Fear shiner, Wikidata item Q3317433. 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.
