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The Razorback Sucker
Last updated on Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Antonio de Espejo, traveling upstream on the Río Grande in 1582 from the present site of El Paso, Texas, wrote in his diary that he and his party encountered a village of upwards of one thousand Indians, who welcomed the Spanish with presents of mesquite and "many varieties of fish."
Fish are not part of our usual image of the desert. Indeed, when the sun blazes hot and the only water in sight is the deceptive shimmer of mirages, it is hard to imagine that any real water exists in the desert. But before the enormous changes wrought by dams, irrigation withdrawals, and wholesale lowering of groundwater levels, rivers did indeed run through the desert. A century ago or less, these same desert rivers offered such an abundant bounty that of fish vendors hawked fresh catches on the streets of Phoenix, Bisbee, Albuquerque, and El Paso.
Each desert river system, isolated by the surrounding expanse of waterless landscape, evolved its own distinctive fish fauna, from six-foot-long Colorado pikeminnow to tiny topminnows, and from archaic-looking shovel-nosed sturgeon to sleek trout. Each kind of fish fit a unique niche in its river system. One of the queerest-looking products of this evolutionary interaction between fish and river is the razorback sucker.
Imagine a big fish, growing up to three feet long in its adulthood, with a body flattened from side to side. Its head is blunt, with a protuberant forward bulge, and underneath a small mouth sporting thick, warty lips. Behind its large eyes rises the reason for this odd fish's name: its back kinks upward in a narrow keel the shape of an old-fashioned straight razor.
From the side, a razorback sucker looks quite bizarre, with its blunt-nosed head and high, humped back. But the fish is perfectly adapted for the habitat where it lives out its adult years: the turbulent reaches of desert rivers. Its flattened body and knife-thin back hump act as a keel, helping the fish easily stay oriented in roaring currents. That tiny mouth with its thick lips vacuums up small bits of food mainly fly and mosquito larvae, and algae‹from riverbottom rocks.
Razorback suckers can live to be forty or fifty years old. Once so abundant throughout the Colorado River system from southwestern Wyoming to the Gulf of California that they could be speared with pitchforks from irrigation canals, these keel-backed fish are now on the endangered species list, along with dozens of other desert fish species.
We cannot let razorback suckers and the other unique fish of desert rivers go. For one thing, they each play a crucial part in their ecosystems. Razorback suckers, for instance, are important predators of flies and mosquitos. For another, a desert without its fish and rivers is no fit place for humans, either.
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