[Rockhounds] SCIENTISTS KILL THE OLDEST KNOWN ANIMAL

[Drew]

On Dec 20, 2007 8:51 AM, J Bryan Kramer <codeburner at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is an even stranger example of this.scientists exterminated an
> entire
> species by accident. The story is that in the Great Smokey Mountains
> National Park  the resident biologists decided to get rid of exotic
> introduced fish, some species of trout IIRC, by poisoning the creeks with
> rotenone, killing all the fish, and then restocking with native species.
>
> So they were carrying out this plan when someone glanced at the fish
> floating belly-up in the creek and exclaimed: "What's that!?"
>
> Well that turned out to be some species of unknown fish that only lived in
> that one creek and they were now all dead...
>
> This was documented in one of McGee's books, probably the one about the
> Appalachian Trail IIRC. I think they later found some related fish in
> other
> creeks but not the exact same species.
>
> BK
>

Smoky madtoms and Yellowfin madtoms were the fish that were *thought* to
have been eliminated... but they have found the same species in other creeks
in the area... what is crazy is that they weren't restocking with native
species, instead they were stocking with the popular, non-native sportfish,
the rainbow trout.  Here is a site about that, <
http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/sightline/V4N1/water.html>

Drew


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