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The San Antonio River Authority recently announced they've discovered the first Guadalupe bass in San Pedro Creek, part of what is known as the West Side Creek System.
TPR’s Jerry Clayton recently spoke with Shaun Donovan, manager of environmental services at the San Antonio River Authority about the discovery.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Clayton: Discovery of this bass is obviously a big deal. Where did you find the fish, and what type of survey was being performed?
Donovan: Our crews found the fish back in December for the first time in San Pedro Creek, and the stretch that they were doing that work in was immediately south of I-10 above the confluence with the San Antonio River. So, what we're doing is we're working on pre-restoration surveys of the West Side Creek System. We're sampling San Pedro, Martinez, Alazán and Apache creeks, so that after the West Side Creek ecosystem restoration project is complete, we can confidently say these are the improvements on the changes that have happened to the creeks because of that restoration effort.
Clayton: Can you tell me a little bit about the efforts to reintroduce the Guadalupe bass here locally in the creek system?
Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. So, the Guadalupe bass is the state fish of Texas, and it's what's called endemic. It only exists in Texas and, more specifically, the Hill Country in the San Antonio area. And so, this fish species was locally extinct in the San Antonio River for probably the last 30 or 40 years. And so, in 2013, Texas Parks & Wildlife, Texas State University and the River Authority got together and started to do a reintroduction project of the species. We reintroduced about 84,000 fish over a three-year period, and since that, eight years ago, when we started stocking these fish, we found them all the way from the Mission Reach all the way down to Goliad County. So, it's been a wildly successful reintroduction project.
Clayton: So obviously, it looks like San Pedro Creek is doing very well. It seems very healthy. What other types of aquatic life can you find in San Pedro Creek right now?
Donovan: Yeah, the really exciting part about finding this fish there is it's what's called an intolerant species. It's an intolerant species of fish that is very particular about the habitat type that it lives in, and the water quality levels that it needs. So, it's really encouraging to see it in the lower stretch of San Pedro Creek, because you honestly don't find a ton of other aquatic wildlife right now. There's a lot of what are called tolerant fish species, like little, small minnows and some catfish, but the finding of the Guadalupe bass is really encouraging because they're starting to make their way up into the West Side Creek system. And theoretically, with this restoration, they'll be able to make their way farther and farther up into the West Side creeks.
Clayton: When people look in the rivers the San Antonio River and the West Side creeks, they probably don't give a lot of thought to the type of creatures living in the water, but this is something that we could all be proud of here in San Antonio, right?
Donovan: I think the big takeaway for us is that this is, I think, the latest, really exciting ecological, biological, environmental positive that has come out of the in this case, the West Side creeks, but the San Antonio River system at large, and we always just talk about making sure people take pride in the in the ecosystem and the biology that's right here in our backyard. The San Antonio River gets a really, really bad rap and has a bad reputation for water quality and all sorts of other things, but it really is an environmental biological gym right in our backyard that we really want to take our time to appreciate so it's really cool to celebrate these types of stories for that for that reason.
