A final Fish and Wildlife Service plan anticipates it could take 30 years, plenty of teamwork and an estimated $92 million to recover the Arkansas River shiner, a 2-inch minnow that’s made a splash in court and on Capitol Hill.
The focus of litigation, advocacy and cattle-rancher ire in the past, the fish currently inhabits parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The Clinton administration listed it as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1998.
“Because the species is currently limited to two extant populations, with multiple stressors affecting their habitat, recovery of the Arkansas River shiner is likely a long-term, challenging process,” the recovery plan acknowledges, adding that success will rely in part on the work of the FWS’s “conservation partners.”
The agency attributes the minnow’s decline to the same “river drying, fragmentation, and channel narrowing” that has hurt many other vulnerable species.
