KU research helps to restore endangered minnow

Two male shiners fight for control of a nesting spot. Behind them, a female shiner waits to mate with the victor. The females produce eggs in small batches all summer, so sparring leaves males ragged and scarred by the end of the spawning season. Garold Sneegas/Contributed

By Cathy Sherman

Research discoveries by KU biologists are helping state and federal wildlife officials bring the endangered Topeka shiner minnow back from the brink of extinction.

One key was confirmation by Scott Campbell, research associate with the Kansas Biological Survey at KU, and his colleagues that the presence of sunfish in the right environments increased the minnow’s natural rate of reproduction.

As a result, KU biologists have been able to propagate thousands of shiners for use in research from an initial stock of 300 taken from one Kansas creek. The biologists have provided the shiners for counterparts at Kansas State University and in the Missouri Department of Conservation for their own studies of this “little-understood” fish, Campbell said.

The 3-inch Topeka shiner, a member of the minnow family Cyprinidae, lives about three years and is found in the calmer runs and pools in the headwaters of certain small streams in Kansas, where it is most common, as well as in limited places in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota.

Developing techniques to propagate Topeka shiners is important to their recovery, considering that the Topeka shiner’s range has declined by nearly 90 percent in the past few decades and it was added to the federal endangered species list in 1998, Campbell said. It now occurs in only a small fraction of places where it once was common and even has vanished from the Topeka creek where the first Topeka shiners to be described by biologists were identified in 1884.