<< I was watching ABC's 20/20 the other night. They did a story on various
Indian
groups' efforts to remove the word "squaw" from common usage because they
consider it offensive to Indian women. The reporter mentioned that the common
name of the squawfish had been officially changed to pikeminnow. Footage of
the
fish was shown. >>
I wish that I had seen that show. It would've been great to record the
segment which showed the pikeminnow ; I would like somethng like that tpo add
to my videotape recordings of various North American fish invertebrates and
amphibians. I've never seen any species of pikeminnow in a living, moving
context before (either video or a live specimen in my prescence) ; just
photos of two or three different species.
Colorado pikeminnows are on of my favorite cyprinid species, besides humpback
and bonytail chubs. I think that North America has the most interesting and
unusual cyprinid species out of all the continents in the world. I don't know
any cyprinid species from any other continent that looks as bizarre as the
bonytail. Guess it helps when the continent has a lot of cyprinid diversity.
Too bad that there isn't a dwarf version of these fishes; they would be
cool-looking minnows to keep in an aquarium!But sadly they grow far too big
for that; such is the fate of many magnificent piscivores. :) Unless you
were wealthy enough to be able to make your own artificial river to put them
in when they got too big; but that's about impossible and besides ,
especially with the trouble that they're in,; I'd rather see them out in the
wild keeping the populations going by their presence there and by breeding
and carrying on the genes by creating some succeeding generations. That's
really what it's all about; making sure that there are always as many
historical populations of all the fish species preserved as possible to live
in their natural home. And, there's many other minnow species to keep to
admire their beauty and enjoy their presence.
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