Smallmouth bass feast on humpback chub, a threatened fish that’s native to the Colorado River. The predators wreaked havoc in the upper river, but were held at bay in Lake Powell where Glen Canyon Dam has served as a barrier for years — until now.
DENVER — For National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Arnold, it was a moment he'd been dreading. Bare-legged in sandals, he was pulling in a net in a shallow backwater of the lower Colorado River last week, when he spotted three young fish that didn't belong there. “Give me a call when you get this!” he messaged a colleague, snapping photos.
There, Brian Healy has worked with the humpback chub for more than a decade and founded the Native Fish Ecology and Conservation Program. If bass and other predator fish continue to get sucked into the penstocks, survive and reproduce below the dam, they will have an open lane to attack chub and other natives, potentially unraveling years of restoration work and upending the Grand Canyon aquatic ecosystem — the only stretch of the river still dominated by native species.
Even before the discovery of smallmouth bass spawning below the dam, agencies had been bracing for this moment. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently enlisted a team of researchers at Utah State University to map the nonnative fish in Lake Powell and try to determine which could pass through the dam first.
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