{"id":54216,"date":"2017-12-04T07:08:20","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T14:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=54216"},"modified":"2017-12-04T10:19:21","modified_gmt":"2017-12-04T17:19:21","slug":"weather-loach-an-extreme-story-of-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/04\/weather-loach-an-extreme-story-of-survival\/","title":{"rendered":"Weather Loach – An Extreme Story Of Survival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many birds and other vertebrates have\u00a0innovative strategies for survival and the weather loach is certainly one of them.<\/p>\n

I’ve mentioned before that the weather loach (pond loach, dojo loach) is a slender and eel-like\u00a0freshwater fish native to East Asia that has become invasive in many of our waterways largely because aquarists\u00a0release them into our streams and ponds. Though they’re a great food source for our fish-eating birds they’ve become an ecological nuisance.\u00a0I didn’t even know they existed until I\u00a0began photographing birds ten years ago\u00a0but since then I’ve become\u00a0aware of just how prevalent they’ve become in the valley waterways of northern Utah.<\/p>\n

These fish are often called weather loaches because they’re extremely sensitive to slight changes in barometric pressure and they become hyperactive and even “stand on their tails” in aquariums when a weather front is approaching.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500\/ f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

As regular readers know weather loaches have been the staple food of “my” male Belted Kingfisher this fall at an old oxbow wetland near the Jordan River. I’ve watched and photographed him (and this female)\u00a0catching and eating dozens of fish and without exception\u00a0every\u00a0fish I’ve been able to see well enough to identify\u00a0has been a weather loach.<\/p>\n

To\u00a0demonstrate just how pervasive this invasive fish has become here’s a few examples of other birds I’ve documented capturing and eating weather loaches over the years at places like Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and near the Jordan River:<\/p>\n

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\"\"1\/2000\/ f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Ring-necked Duck.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000\/ f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Greater Yellowlegs.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200\/ f\/9, ISO 640, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Common Goldeneye.<\/p>\n

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1\/1000\/ f\/11, ISO 500, Canon 40D, Canon 40D, f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Snowy Egret.<\/p>\n

Roughly eight years ago I asked management personnel at Farmington Bay WMA if they knew what species\u00a0the fish was but they had no idea so I sent some photos to my good friend and Director of The Great Salt Lake Nature Center at Farmington Bay Justina Parson’s-Bernstein. She forwarded them to a vertebrate specialist with the State of Utah and he keyed the fish out as weather loaches. I’ve been seeing them regularly ever since.<\/p>\n

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Ok, here’s the “extreme survival” part of the story.<\/p>\n

Earlier this fall the very small oxbow wetland “pond” where I’d been photographing the kingfisher dried up completely. This time of year its only source of water is storm drains\u00a0(I know that because I talked to Murray City Parks Superintendent Kim Sorenson about it)\u00a0and we hadn’t had any rain for months.\u00a0That small pond\u00a0was bone dry for about a week before we had a storm\u00a0which immediately filled it up again. Of course the kingfisher had stopped showing up and I figured it would be next\u00a0year sometime before enough time would have passed for the fish to repopulate the pond and\u00a0lure the kingfisher back.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000\/ f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

So\u00a0I was blown away when two days after the pond filled again the kingfisher was back and catching loaches with almost every dive (I believe this photo was taken on that very day). Where had all\u00a0those loaches come from? The only water to have entered the pond was from storm drains which wouldn’t have any fish\u00a0and two days isn’t nearly enough time to repopulate the pond through natural reproduction.<\/p>\n

Then I remembered something I’d read about weather loaches some years ago. In drying conditions they burrow down into the mud, secrete a mucus “cocoon” around their body to prevent drying, and simply wait until the water comes back. They “breathe” by gulping small amounts of air into their gut so oxygen can be absorbed into their intestinal blood. There are a\u00a0 few other types of fish that do the same thing.<\/p>\n

So that explained the mystery.<\/p>\n

What an incredibly\u00a0effective and innovative\u00a0survival strategy for\u00a0weather loaches! That’s good news for my kingfishers (and for this bird photographer) but bad news for natural resource managers who might want to control invasive loaches by diverting water from ponds and streams.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many birds and other vertebrates have innovative strategies for survival and the weather loach is certainly one of them.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[338,2853,334,8,2782,392],"tags":[49,2329,3385,111,127,1008,2415,188,3699,3700,320],"class_list":["post-54216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-belted-kingfishers","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-ceryle-alcyon","tag-dojo-loach","tag-evolution","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-invasive-fish","tag-jordan-river","tag-pond-loach","tag-salt-lake-county-utah","tag-weather-loach"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/belted-kingfisher-2767-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-e6s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}