A new addition

Association allows 200 new fish into 30-acre Lake Sahara

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One fish, two fish plopped into the water.

It wasn't a tribute to Dr. Seuss, but an effort on the part of the Lakes Association to save an endangered species. The association worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to place 200 razorback sucker fish in Lake Sahara, the 30-acre man-made lake that provides waterfront advantage to homes in The Lakes.

"Because Lake Sahara is so well-maintained and protected from outside threats, it's an ideal refuge for these threatened fish," said Jon Sj?berg, supervising fisheries biologist. "We collected the larvae when they were about 1 to 1 1/2 inches long. Then we grew them in the hatchery for about a year and a half."

The fish were transported from the Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery on Lake Mojave and were roughly 12 inches in length. They came spilling out of the truck tank to plop into the shallow water of the boat ramp area before swimming off.

"If you put baby fish in here, they'd just end up to be food," said Greg Toussaint, president of the neighbor association, who helped organize the effort.

The lake is home to a number of fish species including carp, red-eared sunfish and blue gill. It also is home to bass, which have a nasty habit of displaying how nature handles population control.

"Now that it's spring, residents have been watching baby duckling being hatched on their lawns," said Phillip Schweitz, a resident who enjoys fishing on Lake Sahara. "We had a family of 10 swimming back and forth. The next day it was a family of seven, then a family of three. And then there was no family."

The newly introduced sucker fish devour things like midge fly larvae, excess algae and other plant material and are expected to help keep the lake, which is only about 7 feet deep, cleaner and reduce the number of insects.

Razorback sucker fish are native to the Colorado River. But sport fishermen on the river and on Lake Mead introduced species into the system which are predatory toward the bottom feeders. Giving them a home in The Lakes means they are no longer at risk from being eaten by those fish.

Although named razorbacks, the fish do not have a sharp protrusion but rather a hump on their backs. Because of that, any fish that is caught on a fishing line, Sj?berg said, should be held from underneath when removing the hook from the fleshy mouth.

"The Dangerous Species Act gets a lot of bad press but it doesn't have to be that way," Toussaint said. "Endangered species and private land don't have to be incompatible."