Caddo Lake in east Texas is now the home to thousands of baby paddlefish. The distinctive fish are listed as a threatened species in Texas, and the re-stocking effort is part of a campaign to boost their population.
"This fish is 350 million years old, making it our continent's oldest surviving species and 50 million years older than dinosaurs," said Laura-Ashley Overdyke, Executive Director of the Caddo Lake Institute. "It’s like a fish from a Dr. Seuss book. I mean, this is an amazing fish. It has a rostrum, which is a long bill-like nose, that's about a third of the length of its body."
The habitat for the paddlefish in Texas was disrupted by a dam in the 1950’s, and the population dwindled until they died out in Texas in the 1970’s.
"They get a cue that it's time to spawn from a big spring-time pulse of water. But dams make the flow of water very consistent throughout the year, with no spring-time pulse, so the paddlefish didn’t know it was time to spawn,” Overdyke said. “They also need to lay their eggs on a rocky, hard bottom. But if you don’t have much flow in your rivers, the bottom gets sedimented in and the rocks get covered with goo.”
The fish are still plentiful in other parts of the U.S., so the Caddo Lake Institute has been working for years with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife to rebuild their population.
They delivered 5,000 of the fish to Caddo Lake. They have been re-stocking the lake since 2018 but were not able to deliver any fish to the lake in 2021.
"It's really exciting when we get to do this re-stocking because it's the only project like this in the world," Overdyke said.
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