10 Recently Extinct Fish Species.

The subject of extinct species isn't necessarily something that is fun to talk about, and honestly can be a bit depressing. However, there is something fascinating in learning about what once was and reflecting on what we can do differently to help species survive in the future. The Chinese paddlefish was a colossal river predator historically roaming some of China's major rivers. It had a long paddle-like snout that was more than half of its body length. Records of this species note that it reached 3-7 meters or 10-23 feet long. This made it one of the largest freshwater fish species on earth, and much larger than the American paddlefish. Unlike the filter-feeding American paddlefish, the Chinese paddlefish was a fast predator with sharp teeth that hunted smaller fish. It was once common and prized for its flesh in caviar. Unfortunately, extensive dam building and overfishing drove the fish to extinction. After the 1981 Jezebel Dam blocked its spawning migrations, populations crashed. In the 1980s, it was extremely rare and the last confirmed sighting was a juvenile in 2003. Despite many intensive searches, scientists formally declared the Chinese paddlefish extinct. Its disappearance highlights how dams and intensive fishing can wipe out a species that was once considered abundant. The New Zealand grayling was an amphidromous fish, migrating between fresh and saltwater, found in the rivers of both the North and the South Islands. It grew about 30-45 centimeters or 12-18 inches. This was a slender and silvery fish. Its sides were bright silver and its back was gray or brown. It even had a small adipose fin like a salmon. In the 19th century, it was very common and was heavily fished and even used as fertilizer. This has been the only freshwater fish in New Zealand to go extinct since human settlement. The extinction of the grayling happened very abruptly. It was last reliably caught in 1923 and in 1986 it was officially listed as extinct. Scientists believe no single cause led to its loss but a perfect storm of factors. Deforestation, land development, sedimentation, polluted streams, intensive harvesting, and introduced trout which preyed on grayling and brought disease. The trout factor was actually very destructive as the trout ate grayling eggs and preyed on the young that otherwise had no predators. This fish had been a unique, locally evolved relative of Australia's grayling and its loss left a noticeable gap in New Zealand's river ecosystems. The silver trout was a char once found in two glacial lakes in northern New Hampshire. It was a spall relative of lake trout and brook trout, closely resembling brook trout. It was only around 30 centimeters or 12 inches long but it was striking in color. Its back was an olive green fading to bright silvery belly tinged with orange red like brook trout. Females had faint golden spots on the sides and males were darker with more red on the belly. Males grew significantly larger than the females unlike most trout leading to dramatic sexual dimorphism in size and color. The silver trout lived in the deep clear cold waters with no natural predators until humans stalked other fish. Sadly it could not survive human introductions. In the late 1800s anglers stalked the lakes with new fish like yellow perch, lake trout, rainbow trout, brown trout, and salmon. Yellow perch and lake trout in particular proved disastrous. Perch ate the trout eggs and lake trout competed for food and hybridized with the char. These invaders overwhelmed and isolated the silver trout. The last six confirmed specimens were collected in 1930 and after which none have been found and the year 1930 is usually given as the official extinction date. The loss of the silver trout is an especially sobering loss for all those anglers who love trout in North America. The Santa Cruz pupfish was a tiny fish found in the Santa Cruz river of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. This fish was just a few centimeters long. It's said that the males were olive or grayish with subtle coloring and the females were more silvery. This fish evolved in desert springs and streams surviving high salinity and temperature variations that would kill most other fish. The last known wild sightings of the Santa Cruz pupfish were in the late 1960s and by 1971 it was considered absent in its range. In 2011 it was officially listed as extinct. The culprit for extinction was primarily water use. In the early 20th century settlers drilled and pumped groundwater and by the mid-century the springs feeding its habitat had dried up or were severely diminished. Without flowing water the fish simply had nowhere to live. The Santa Cruz pupfish had no threats like predators it was just habitat loss pure and simple. Efforts to breed or reintroduce this pupfish never happened as little was ever known about the existence of the fish. It was only formally described in 2002 from the museum specimens. Sadly the Santa Cruz pupfish joined many desert fishes lost to irrigation and groundwater depletion in the southwest. The catarina pupfish is another pupfish of the American southwest. This was one of the rarest freshwater fish in North America only found in a single tiny desert spring in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. This fish suffered a similar fate to the Santa Cruz pupfish with its habitat drying up. It was officially declared extinct in 2014 when the last known individual died in captivity in a Mexican university. However that being said the species had already disappeared from the wild decades earlier with the last confirmed sightings occurring in the early 1970s. This was one of the very few fish species to go extinct in captivity after disappearing from the The thick-tailed chub was a stout minnow native to California's central valley. This heavy-bodied fish had an unusually thick deep tail and grew from around 25 to 30 centimeters or 10 to 12 inches. It was an olive green with yellow belly. It once thrived in warm slow-moving waters of marshes oxbow lakes and sloughs and this species could even venture out into brackish bay waters during floods. The thick-tailed chub was a common food source for the Native Americans in central California. By the mid-20th century its habitat was destroyed. Draining wetlands for agriculture, dams, and water diversions eliminated the warm marshes that it needed. Introduced predators like bass, catfish, and sunfish also likely contributed to its downfall. The last known thick-tailed chub was collected on April 16, 1957. By the 1960s it had vanished entirely. The black fin cisco was a deep water white fish native to the great lakes of North America. It had a deep silvery body around 52 to 50 centimeters or 21 to 20 inches in length. It had a dark back and pinkish-purple flanks with characteristically black-tipped fins. It swam in the depths of lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior. At one time it was valued by fisheries for its size and rich flesh. Overfishing in the 1950s and 60s decimated black fin ciscos as unregulated commercial nets pulled them from the deep lakes. At the time, invasive species also took their toll. Lake trout and the predatory sea lamprey preyed on the ciscos, and invasive forage fish ate their young. By the early 1960s catches had collapsed. The last record was from Lake Michigan in 1969. In 1996 it was officially listed as extinct. The Lake Geneva whitefish was a small whitefish unique to Lake Geneva on the Swiss-French border. It grew only about 25 to 32 centimeters or 10 to 13 inches in length. This fish lived near the bottom of the lake feeding on plankton. It was a cornerstone species of Geneva's fishery along with a related whitefish called the true farra. In 1890 these two species made up for around 70% of all the fish caught in the lake. The Lake Geneva whitefish was an especially important resource and was caught by local fishermen in huge numbers. And that intensive fishing was its downfall. Beginning in the late 1800s, overfishing and nutrient pollution from farms and towns destroyed Lake Geneva's ecosystem. Fertilizer runoff caused algae blooms and low oxygen in the winter, harming whitefish reproduction. It was last reported in the early 1900s. Unfortunately no museum specimens exist and all we have are drawings. The hairlip sucker was a strange small catastomid sucker native to clear gravel bottom streams of the eastern and midwestern US. The key feature was its mouth. The upper lip was rigid and could not protrude outwards, while the lower lip was split into two lobes, a specific trait that was unique to this sucker. The fish grew to be around 45 to 50 centimeters or 18 to 20 inches long. It had a very typical olive green sucker coloration with silvery sides and a white belly. Like most other suckers, hairlip suckers were bottom feeders. Stomachs of the museum specimens contained snails, clams, limpets, and other invertebrates. They relied on very clear water using sight to find these prey. With the 19th century logging and farming, stream waters became muddied by siltation. The fine sediments choked streams and killed off the snails and clams that the sucker fed on. In murky water, this sight-feeding fish could not hunt as well and its spawning areas were destroyed. The last hairlip sucker was collected in 1893 and by the mid-20th century it was recognized as extinct. It even holds the dubious record of disappearing from eight states more than any other North American fish. The Scioto madtom was a tiny catfish native to the United States. Known from only one stream in Ohio, Big Darby Creek. It only reached around 6 to 7 centimeters or around 2 inches in length. Like other madtoms, it had barbels or whiskers and mildly venomous spines. It was a nocturnal bottom feeder hiding under rocks by day and feeding on aquatic insects by night. This fish was extremely rare and only 18 individuals were ever collected. Four of them in 1943 through 45 and 14 specimens in 1957 from a single 150 meter stretch of the creek. After 1957, it was never seen again. The Scioto madtom was listed as endangered in 1975 but it was likely already gone. No one has seen one in over 60 years and in 2021 it was officially declared extinct. The likely causes of extinction for this fish was loss of habitat in a very limited range. While the subject of this video may be a bit depressing, I hope that if anything it instills the desire to learn some more about endangered species that we are still holding on to as well as take all the necessary steps to conserve the amazing species that still remain. Thank you for watching and please consider subscribing.