I Found A Flame Chub At Swan Creek Yesterday

I was wondering if this would happen. I've visited Swan Creek at Elkton Road in Athens, AL, three times now, and the third time I found a single flame chub. This is an historic flame chub site, that I've reported as lacking flame chubs in my surveys to date. My students and I spent 2 hours netting the creek in early April looking for flame chubs and didn't find any. Yesterday I went there with Christian and Jennifer looking for alpha male scarlet shiners for Jennifer's study, and I found a flame chub stuck in our seine's mesh about 50 meters upstream from the bridge. In three visits to the site I've probably seen 600-700 fish that we've netted, and only one has been a flame chub.

So, my corrected tally for this survey is now 33 historic sites visited with flame chubs found at 11 of them, a 67% range reduction. At most of those 11 sites we've only found a single flame chub. So I think the phenomenon is both range constriction, and small surviving populations. I re-read the flame chub species description at the http://www.natureserve.org site yesterday, and it was mentioned that the average number of individuals found in surveys was 10.3. That's certainly not the case for Alabama sites; I think I could name 5 flame chub sites that have healthy populations. So it's a work in progress, like I've been saying all along.